Solid black dragon tattoo with a spiked head, flowing jaw lines and a curled tail, on the forearm, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black dragon tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black dragon with a spiked head, open jaw and long trailing lines runs down the arm, ending in a tight spiral tail dotted along its edge. The bold, unshaded linework is filled with solid black ink, and the design is shown in close view against plain pale skin with no colour.

Blackwork Forearm Dragon Spike Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gideon had been painting the dragon on the shutter of Parr's Bakery since midnight, because Mrs Parr wanted it finished before the first trams rattled past the corner. The street lamps hummed above him. The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the wet pavement still threw back the orange glow from the oven vents, and each time the back door opened, a gust of burnt sugar rolled out and made his eyes water.

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He had sketched the beast on the back of a delivery invoice: a long narrow head, jaw hanging open, three spikes sweeping back from the brow like the fins of a fish, and a body that unspooled down the metal in one trailing line. Mrs Parr had laughed when she saw it. "It looks hungry," she said. "Good. Hungry things sell bread."

The tail was the hard part. He kept it tight, a spiral that wound inward until there was barely room for the brush, and he dotted the edge with small black knuckles so it looked like something that had been coiled up in the dark for years. Halfway round the last loop his wrist jerked on a passing taxi's headlights, and a bead of paint ran down the shutter in a thin black tear.

He stood back and cursed under his breath. Then the first baker's boy came out with a tray of cooling loaves, stopped, and pointed at the drip where it fell from the dragon's jaw. When the shutter rose at six, the mark looked exactly like a spark leaving its mouth. Mrs Parr said nothing about it. She simply set a warm loaf on the ledge beside his paint tin and pushed it towards him.