Black and grey dragon tattoo with a coiled tail and a small line of script beneath it, on a person's left side ribs.

Black and grey dragon tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey dragon with outstretched wings and a long coiling tail runs down the side of the torso, with its head near the upper ribs. A line of fine italic script sits beside the tail, though much of it is too small to read clearly. The shading is soft and detailed, and the photograph is taken from a standing angle with a dark top above and jeans below.

Realism Ribs Dragon Script Quote Wing Tail

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came down off the Sallow Fells on the morning of the wedding, which is why the bride's father sent you up the scree with a cold ham, a stone jar of perry and a folded note he would not let you read. You were eleven and the only child in Heddle Cross who could climb without losing a shoe, so the job was yours.

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It was lying in the heather with its wings folded like a wet umbrella, its long tail wound three times round a rowan. One eye opened when you set the basket down. It ignored the ham. Instead it dragged a claw through the dust and drew a line of small, slanting letters that ran the length of its tail and gave up halfway. You could make out the first word, which was Who, and the last, which might have been Lime. The rest was lost in the curl.

You understood, eventually, that it wanted you to fetch the bride. Years before, she had told the dragon, sitting on the same crag with her boots dangling, that she would dance with anyone who came to her wedding, even a monster. Her mother had thought it a joke. The dragon had not. So you ran down the path with your heart knocking, and at dusk it came over the orchard, wings catching the lanterns, and lifted her off the lawn for one turn of the reel before setting her down so gently the fiddler forgot his bow.

In the morning someone found letters scratched into the byre door, fine and italic and quite legible now, though they were not the words you expected. You copied them out in your own careful hand, and you still have the paper, though you have never managed to finish the line, because the dragon wrote the last part smaller than any child could hold a pencil to.