Black and grey coiled dragon tattoo on the outer thigh of a woman in a black mesh-panel swimsuit, with the head near the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled dragon on an outer thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A coiled dragon or serpent with a scaled body and a head turned towards the hip wraps around the outer thigh. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with grey shading across the body and scales. The subject is shown from the hip to the knee against a pale wall, and only the torso and leg are visible.

Thigh Dragon Serpent Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, the kettle's only just stopped ticking, and you'll want to hear this before the rain gets into the cabin. My grandfather worked the Sallow lock for forty years, and he swore that under the tail-race lay a dragon coiled round the old stone pier, so long that the weed on its back had grown into a hill of its own.

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Nobody had seen the head in living memory, only the shine of it when the moon came low, and the way the ducks would not land above the third gate. Then the dry summer came, the river went thin as tea, and the barge Marigold stuck fast on the shallows with a load of Welsh slate. Tobias Crane, who owned her and had no patience for stories, took a crowbar down the steps at dawn to shift the pier stones and be done with it.

The dragon did not rise up roaring. It lifted one scaled coil out of the mud, slow as a tide turning, and its head came round to rest on the gunwale beside him, eyes like wet coal. Tobias said later that it looked at him the way a tired lock keeper looks at a boat that has come too late in the day. Then it breathed out, the river came up the channel a hand's width in the space of a breath, and the Marigold floated free.

He never swung the crowbar. He went home, paid the toll he owed the weir, and every year after that he left a sack of barley on the bottom step. Mind your footing on the way out. That grey scale by the lamp is one the creature shed for him, and it has never once been cold.