Black and grey realism tattoo of a winged dragon wrapped in smoke, on the outer upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey dragon on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with spread wings and horned head is shown in profile, coiled over a rocky ledge. The dragon is rendered in smooth black and grey shading with detailed scales, and dark smoky clouds surround it. The composition fills the upper arm, with the design curving from the shoulder down the outer arm.

Realism Upper arm Dragon Wing Smoke Cloud Horn Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smoke came down off Scarra the week the ferry stopped running, grey at first and then black, rolling over the ledge like wet wool. My mother said it was the peat fires on the mainland side blowing across the sound, and she said it with her back to me, which is how I knew she was lying.

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I was twelve and had never been let past the harbour wall alone, so naturally I went. The path up the north face was loose shale and sheep dung, and by the second bend the air had gone thick and warm, smelling of struck flint. The dragon lay along the ledge where the gulls used to nest. Its wings were folded like old sails with the sea gone out of them, and the tips of its horns were chipped. It was not asleep. One eye, the colour of tarnished pewter, followed me the whole way along the rock.

"You've come about the boats," it said, in a voice like a door that needed oil. I told it my grandfather's boat was out past the Skerries with his nets and the fog had come in behind him. The dragon breathed out slowly, the cloud around its shoulders thinned, and I saw the boat far below, rocking in clear water, my grandfather standing up in it and waving his cap. "Smoke keeps the weather off the island," it said. "It is tiring to hold. Somebody has to hold the corners."

I asked what it wanted. It lowered its great head until I could see my own face in the scales and said only, "Tell them the ledge is not empty." I climbed down with a loose scale in my fist, warm as bread. When I reached the harbour the cloud was lifting off the water like a sheet pulled from a line, and an hour later the ferry came round the point. Nobody asked me where I'd been, and I never told them.