Black and red dragon tattoo with loose ink splashes wrapping around the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and red dragon on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A long, serpentine dragon with a whiskered head and flowing mane is tattooed across the upper arm and shoulder. Bold black ink forms the head, spine and fins, with red ink used for the body and tail. Loose black splatter marks and drips surround the design, giving it a painterly, watercolour-like finish against a plain background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire wants company, and this one is about the dragon that lived in the strait between Kelp Holm and the mainland, the one the fishermen called Ink-Back because of the black water it churned up in winter. Every spring the herring came in thick as spilled tar, and every spring old Marta Feeney rowed out before dawn to ask the dragon's leave. She carried a tin of red pigment ground from rowan berries and a brush made from a gull's wing feather. She would paint one stroke on the gunwale, and the water would answer with a splash of black.

Keep reading

The year the lamp failed on the Skerry, the boats went out blind, and Marta's son Tam was among them. She rowed out in the fog with no tin, no brush, only her two hands, and she shouted into the grey that she had nothing to give but her own blood. The dragon came up slow. Its whiskers trailed through the swell like weed, and its mane was dark and running. It looked at her with an eye like a drowned coin, and it did not take her blood. Instead it coiled once around her little boat and turned the fog aside like a curtain.

Tam came home at noon with a face full of salt. Marta never painted another stroke after that. The fishermen say the dragon still hangs in the strait, red along its belly and black at the head, and that if you row out in the fog and leave a single drop of rowan ink on the water, it will carry you home.

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