Full arm sleeve of a blue Japanese-style dragon with red flames, its head on the shoulder and body wrapping down the upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue Japanese dragon sleeve on an arm

Japanese · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A dragon with a horned head, open jaws and long whiskers sits on the shoulder and upper arm, its scaled body wrapping down the arm. The scales are shaded in blues with dark outlines, while red flame-like wisps and pale highlights add contrast. The close photograph against a dark background shows the sleeve across the upper arm and forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came up out of the indigo vat on the third morning of the rains, and Hester Lowe swore afterwards that she had only been stirring it to stop the skin forming. Blue dripped from the paddle. Where it fell on the flagstones it lay in coins, and the coins had scales in them, tiny overlapping rings that caught the light from the yard door.

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Her grandfather had dyed cloth for the mill at Sallow Ford for forty years and never once mentioned dragons. He had mentioned a river, though, which ran under the dye house and was said to be the dragon's own, and that the vat was only a cup poured from it. She had thought this was the kind of thing old men said to keep apprentices from wandering off at dusk.

The creature was no longer than her forearm when it first lifted its head, horned and pale-whiskered, and it looked at her the way the mill manager looked at a bolt of cloth with a fault in it. Then it opened its jaws and breathed out a thread of red, the colour of the madder she kept on the high shelf, and the thread curled round the vat like a flame that had decided to be polite.

I am writing this down for you, Tom, because you will not believe me. The dragon is in the vat now. It has grown to fill the cloth you left soaking, and the river has come up over the step. Bring the lamp. Do not bring the mill ledger. I have decided it can have the cloth instead.

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