Black and grey dragon tattoo with flaming tail wisps and clawed feet wrapping down the inner forearm, shown in a shaded realistic style.

Black and grey dragon on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with an open-jawed head, clawed feet and a long spined tail coils down the forearm. The linework is bold and the body is built up with heavy grey shading, highlights and smoke-like wisps along the back and legs. The ink is entirely black and grey against the skin, with the design filling most of the frame on a plain background.

Traditional Realism Forearm Dragon Claw Flame Spike

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been broken since Tuesday, so you climb. Fourteen flights, the stairwell smelling of bleach and wet pushchairs, and on the landing between the eighth and ninth floors the wall that has only ever held a grey smudge of old paint. Tonight the smudge has edges. Tonight it has claws.

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Mrs Okonedo on the sixth floor says the council sent men with grey emulsion in March, and that one of them hummed the whole time he worked. You tell her it's damp. She shows you the keys she keeps on a loop, the ones she hasn't used since her husband went into the hospice, and says the damp doesn't usually have whiskers.

When you reach the fourteenth floor the dragon has come up the wall ahead of you. It coils round the fire door, its jaw open over the lift shaft as if it has been waiting for the cables to snap. Smoke curls off its back and drifts along the ceiling, and the dust on the landing has been pressed into the shape of its feet. You lay your palm against the paint. It is warm, the way a sleeping animal is warm.

At the window the city is a grid of lit squares. Far below, the dragon's tail slides down the outside of the block, scales catching the orange of the streetlamps, and a child shouts from a balcony for it to wait. You go back down the stairs slowly, counting floors. By morning the lift is working again and the wall is only grey, though on the eighth landing someone has left a single claw print in the dust, pointing up.