Black and grey Japanese-style tattoo sleeve with a dragon and cloud motifs covering a person's lower leg, shown in a street setting.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey Japanese-style leg sleeve with dragon

Japanese · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two legs are shown from mid-thigh to ankle, covered in a full sleeve of dark tattoos that appear to include a dragon, clouds and foliage. The work uses bold black outlines and grey shading with lighter areas left as skin-toned negative space. The photo is taken outdoors on a city street with a blurred car behind, and the wearer is in pink running shoes.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Calder House had been dead since March, so every evening I climbed the fourteen flights with my shopping bags knocking against my shins, and every evening the dragon was waiting on the stairwell wall between the eleventh and twelfth floors. Grandad Ray painted it there the summer I was nine, when the council still paid for emulsion and his hand was still steady. He had been a sign-writer before his chest went, and he said a dragon was only a long line that had decided to be brave.

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Its body runs up the plaster in black outline, scales packed tight, with grey wash behind it like weather coming in off the Irish Sea. Clouds curl round its back wherever he left the wall bare, and a fern with fronds like cut paper grows out of the skirting board. He let me fill in the grey on the lower tail, kneeling on the top step with a jam jar of water and a brush he'd trimmed down for my small fingers. I got it too dark. He said dark was honest and I'd learn to lift it.

The damp got into the wall the winter after he died. A man from the housing office came with a scraper and a bucket and the face of someone with a dozen jobs before Friday, and he took off a patch the size of a dinner plate exactly where the dragon's eye should have been. Now there is only pale plaster looking out at the stairwell window.

I bought a tin of matt black and a fine brush from the hardware shop on Lodge Road, and on Sunday I sat on the top step with the jam jar and tried. My hand was not his. The eye came out a little lopsided. But when I stood back under the landing light, the dragon looked at me sideways, the way he used to when I'd done something right and he didn't want to say so. I left a sliver of white along the brow, because he always said you should leave the light somewhere to get in.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.