Black and grey shaded dragon tattoo with spread wings and a curled tail across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey dragon on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon is shown in mid-flight with its wings spread wide and its head turned to the right. The body, wings and curling tail are rendered with dark outlines, fine hatching and soft grey shading to suggest scales and volume. The design fills the upper back, with the wing edges fading into the surrounding skin.

Back Dragon Wing Tail Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down nearer, you lot, and mind the gull that thinks it owns this bench. My grandmother's grandmother saw the dragon come over Saltcombe Head the winter the herring failed. Grey as wet slate, she said, with wings spread wide enough to cover the harbour mouth, and every boat in the bay strained at its rope as the shadow passed over.

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Folk ran for the sea wall with their pots and their prayers. Only old Tamsin Rowe stayed on the quay, because her son was still out past the buoy and she would not go home without him. The dragon came down low over the water, its head turned sideways the way a heron eyes a fish, and it did not breathe fire. It opened its jaws and sang, a low sound like a bell struck under the ocean.

Tamsin knew that note. It was the bell from St Piran's, the one the storm tore from the tower forty years before and dropped in the deep channel. She had rung it as a girl. So she walked to the end of the quay, unhooked the rusted chain from its post, and told the creature plainly that it could have its bell back if it brought her boy home.

The dragon's claws closed on the iron mooring ring set in the granite for lifting nets. Then it rose into the dark and came back towing a small boat, her son hauling on the oars, the sea gone flat as glass around him. They say the bell still lies in the channel, and on still nights you can hear it humming, and that the dragon keeps watch over it, waiting for someone to ask the right question.