Black and grey shaded dragon tattoo running from the shoulder down the upper arm, with its horned head resting on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey dragon across shoulder and arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded dragon with horns and a long curving body wraps from the shoulder over the upper arm, with its wing spread across the outer arm and its tail trailing towards the elbow. The scales, wing membrane and head are rendered with soft grey shading and fine detail, giving a three-dimensional effect. The tattoo is the clear focus against a plain background, with a patterned purple and pink top and beaded necklace in the frame.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Dragon Wing Horn Tail Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put another log on, Tam, the fire has gone thin, and I will tell you about the grey dragon of Hollin Wood before your mother comes to fetch you home. Nobody in Ashby Fold would go past the last stile after dark in my grandmother's day, for the trees stood close there and the bracken grew higher than a man's shoulder. Yet every Sunday a girl named Elspeth Marrow walked up that path with a loaf wrapped in linen, and she came down again with the cloth folded and the loaf gone.

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The dragon was grey as wet slate in the shade, and when the light caught it you could see the fine ridges of its scales, each one shaded darker at the edge like a leaf after rain. Its horns swept back over a head as long as a cart, and its wing lay folded against its flank like an old umbrella. Elspeth said its tail was the longest thing she had ever seen, trailing back through the bracken and curling round the roots of the oak where it slept. She talked to it through the whole of one winter, and the wing crept over her shoulders the morning the frost came hard enough to crack the water trough.

Then the mill wheel caught that wing one stormy night, and the membrane tore like wet paper. The village men wanted to go up with pitchforks. Elspeth went up instead with a needle, a skein of waxed thread and a jar of goose grease, and she sat in the bracken for three days stitching the grey skin back together while the dragon held very still and watched her hands. When it finally lifted off the hill and circled the roofs of Ashby Fold, the whole village stood in the lanes with their mouths open.

On the morning after, a single grey scale lay on Elspeth's doorstep, warm to the touch and as big as a palm. She kept it on a nail above her hearth until the day she died. So if you go up to the trees tonight, leave the bread on the flat stone and ask it for nothing. It never asked my grandmother for anything either, and that is how we knew it had chosen us.