Black and grey realistic dragon with a shaded head and scaled body, claws gripping a sphere, tattooed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey dragon gripping a sphere on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A dragon with an open, snarling mouth and horns coils its scaled body around a rounded sphere held in its clawed feet. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth and detailed, giving the scales and head a three-dimensional look. The design is entirely in black and grey and fills the outer upper arm, with the skin tone and a red background visible at the edges.

Realism Upper arm Dragon Sphere Claw Scale Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon in the hollow above Marrow Ford had kept its coils around the one egg-shaped stone for longer than anyone in Thornleigh could remember, and the villagers had long ago stopped asking why. Ada Pell, who kept the bees at the forest's edge, asked anyway the spring the stream went black. She climbed the path with a loaf in a cloth and a pot of honey, and set them down a safe distance from the beast's claws.

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The dragon opened one eye, then the other. Its jaws stayed shut, which she took for courtesy. "Why do you hold that stone?" she asked. "Your coils are tired. I can see the scales lifting."

It was a long while before the great head lowered. The stone, it said, was not a treasure. It was the last thing the river had given it when the river was young, and a dragon that lets go of its keeping lets go of the water too. So it had held on, and the water had thinned, and the black had come down from the hills.

Ada sat on the wet moss and broke the bread. "Then keep the stone," she said, "but let the river drink from your coils. Lie loose where the spring comes out. Bees carry water further than you would think."

The dragon did not thank her. In the morning, though, the stream ran clear through the willows, and a single scale lay on the path by her hives, bright as a coin, with a clawmark pressed into the honey on its edge.