Black and grey blackwork tattoo on a thigh showing a castle skyline with crescent moons, mountains, a water band and stripes, with a dragon below near the knee.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle skyline and dragon on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper leg in a dark bodysuit, showing a large tattoo across the thigh. The upper thigh features a spired castle skyline with crescent moons above mountain shapes, above a band of horizontal lines suggesting water and a shoreline, then a striped band around the leg. Below, near the knee, a greyscale dragon is shaded with fine linework against the pale skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and pass me that cup, because you won't get the dragon out of me until you've heard about the town across the bay. Seven spires it had, grey stone on the headland, and every one of them wore a moon on top, a silver crescent the old masons hung from iron rods so sailors could read the hour from the sea.

Keep reading

The harbourmaster's girl, Ilse Marrow, was the only one who climbed the north spire that winter. She went up with a coil of rope and a tin of lamp oil, and when she reached the top she found the moons weren't there at all. Someone had taken them down in the night and set them on the water, and they were floating out past the mole like two pale fish, slow and patient, waiting for somebody to row out and ask them why.

She rowed out in her father's dinghy with the tide running against her. The sea was flat as slate and the mountains behind the town lay on it, upside down, their ridges doubled in the still water. Where the dragon came up from underneath, nobody could say. Its back broke the surface in banded ridges like a striped shoal, and its eye was the colour of lamp oil.

It asked her one question, the way they always do. Which is the true town, the one on the hill or the one in the water? Ilse thought about it all the way home, and by morning she had decided. That is why the moons are back on the spires, and why the dragon still swims the bay with its tail curled round the lighthouse, waiting for somebody to answer it differently.

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