Black and grey realism dragon tattoo with spread wings across a person's back, with the head turned to the right and mouth open.

Black and grey dragon across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with spread wings and a long tail is tattooed across the upper back, with its head facing right and its mouth open. The linework is soft and the shading is detailed, with smooth gradients across the wing membranes, scales and muscular body. Only black and grey ink is used, and the design fills most of the frame against the bare skin.

Realism Back Dragon Wing Tail Claw Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pryce still had my old exercise book, and he held it up at the Crown Hotel like a raffle ticket. Everyone groaned. The dragon on the back page had wings spread across both spreads and a tail that ran off into the margin, where he'd written in red biro: distracting, but the shading is remarkable. Thirty years on, that one word was the only thing I could hear.

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I had drawn it with a blunt HB pencil during a supply lesson, because the boys in row three said I could only draw hedgehogs in school caps. I gave it a long neck and an open mouth full of teeth, then spent the rest of the hour smudging its belly with my thumb until the grey went soft as dust. Nobody asked what it was guarding. I didn't know myself.

Jess Okafor found me by the bar, dug into her handbag and produced the pages I'd torn out and passed round in maths, folded into squares gone soft at the corners. Hers had been in the same lesson, she said, and she'd kept it flat between two books for twenty years. She tapped the far wing. You never finished this one, she said. Are you still stuck on it?

I took a napkin from the bar, borrowed Pryce's biro, and started on the second wing while the disco thudded through the wall. The hedgehogs had gone home by then. Somewhere behind me Pryce was telling someone I had talent, and for once I didn't correct him.