Solid black tribal dragon tattoo with spread wings and a curling tail, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black tribal dragon with spread wings on a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tribal dragon with its wings spread wide and its tail curling downward across the upper back. The design uses bold solid black fills with sharp, tapering wing edges and interior swirl and notch detailing. The ink is entirely black on pale skin, with no greys or colour visible.

Back Dragon Wing Tail Tribal

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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

Now sit closer, for the fire is low and this part is for the ones who listen to the end. In the kingdom of Ambermoor, where the salt roads met the high pass, there was a dragon the people called Hollin, though nobody could say who gave it the name. It was not painted in any colour. Its scales were the black of wet slate, and its wings were cut so sharp at their edges that the wind sang when they moved.

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Every spring the river Dunre ran brown with snowmelt, and every spring the ferryman's son went out on the water to clear the dead fish from the weirs. One April he did not come back. His mother walked the bank for three days calling his name, and on the third evening the dragon came down out of the cliffs and laid its long tail across the mud, curled like a question, and waited for her to stop.

She did not stop. She threw her shawl at its face, and the dragon, which had never been spoken to so plainly, lifted its head and looked at her with eyes like two chips of coal. Then it turned to the river and spread its wings wide, so that the whole valley went dark beneath them, and she understood it was showing her the way the current had taken him: through the swirl below the weir, where the water turned on itself and never let go.

They pulled the boy out at dawn, cold and alive, tangled in a net that the dragon had somehow hooked free with one claw. Some in Ambermoor say the creature left the valley that same week and flew over the sea. I say it simply folded its wings and lay down in the dark under the cliffs, because a creature that keeps the river honest has no need to be seen doing it. Mind the weir on your way home. Its tail still curls there, if you know where to look.