Line drawing of a figure with a black and purple tattoo on the upper arm and forearm, beside a blue gradient dragon design with dotwork scales and a curled tail.

Blue dragon designs with an arm tattoo outline

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Flash

A digital line drawing shows a faint body outline with black and purple tattoo designs on the upper arm and forearm. Beside it sits a larger blue-to-purple gradient dragon or serpent motif, with a dotted body, a curled tail and stylised wings or fins. Fine outlines and dot fills are used throughout, set against a plain cream background.

Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Dragon Serpent Figure Arm Dot Swirl Wing

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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

Sit down, the lot of you. The last train left Hollin Cross in nineteen fifty-eight and never came back, so you may as well hear the dragon's story before the rain sets in. He was not born in the hills. He came up out of the water tank beside platform two, where the engines drank, because a fireman called Dorrie Penhale had dropped a bag of brass buttons in, and the buttons had swum.

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Each dot along his back was a button from a Leeds mill coat, and each one had a face if you looked long enough. He wound his tail round the signal box three times, the way a man winds a scarf in January, and when the stationmaster asked him to leave, he only said, in a voice like wet coal, that he was waiting for a driver who would stop.

So Dorrie climbed into the cab of the Lily Bell, the one engine left in the shed, and she waited. The dragon came down the line beside her in the dark, his fins cut from a broken umbrella, his colour sliding from blue to violet wherever the lamps touched him. Nobody had ever stopped for him. Dorrie pulled the regulator anyway.

That is why, if you stand on platform two at the turn of the year, you will see a line of blue lights running out past the bridge, and why the timetable still shows a 6.40 that nobody has ever seen arrive. Mind the gap. He is still watching the cab, hoping someone will lean out and wave.