Black and grey realistic dragon tattoo with a scaled body and spiked head wrapping across an upper arm, with shaded smoke-like details behind it.

Black and grey dragon on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with a spiked head, open jaws and a long segmented body curls across the upper arm, with its tail trailing down towards the elbow. The linework is fine and the scales are rendered with detailed shading, giving the creature depth and a sculpted, three-dimensional look. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey ink, with soft smoky shading around the wings and body against the skin.

Realism Upper arm Dragon Tail Scale Wing Spike Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came up out of the Slaley shaft on the morning the cage jammed, and nobody in the lamp room believed Tom Harrow when he said so. He had been hanging in the dark for forty minutes with his boots against the wet brick, listening to the rope tick and the water drip somewhere far below, when the gas-lamp at his shoulder guttered blue and he saw the thing curled round the timber set above him. Its scales were the grey of old slate. Its jaws hung open, and the smoke coming from them smelled of wet coal and church candles.

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He did not scream. Miners learn young that the dark keeps what you shout at. Instead he asked it, in the flat Northumbrian voice his mother used for stray dogs, what it wanted for letting him go. The dragon's eye, the colour of a struck match, considered him for a long while. Then it lowered its spiked head and laid its tail down the shaft wall, segment over segment, until the tail's tip rested against the cage like a hand offered across a table.

He climbed the tail. It was warm, and it bent beneath his weight as a bridge bends, and when he reached the top the cage came free with a clang that brought the whole shift running. By the time the men had the winch turning again, the shaft was empty of anything but air. Tom kept his own counsel after that, except on Sundays, when he drew the outline of a dragon's wing on the back of his hand in pencil and told his children it was the price of the rope.