Colour tattoo of a green and rainbow mythical creature with swirling flame-like scrolls and golden bells, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful mythical creature with swirls on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A mythical serpent-like creature with an open mouth and a scaled, ornamental body is surrounded by swirling scrolls that resemble flames. Golden bells hang from a trailing tail at the lower edge of the design. The shading is smooth and gradated, with bold outlines and vivid colour, and the design fills the frame against plain skin.

Neo-trad Thigh Serpent Swirl Scroll Flame Bell Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every evening the old sacristan climbed the wooden stairs of the Wat Chan with a rope in one hand and a lantern in the other, because he had been told the naga would not sleep until the last bell was rung. The river town had nine temples and each kept a serpent painted on its gate, but only this one had a tail that trailed down the steps and ended in a cluster of bronze bells.

Keep reading

The painter who came down from the hills in the rains was a young woman called Mali, sent to freshen the gate before the festival. She mixed her reds from crushed lac and bought her indigo off a boat that smelled of tar. Watching her work, the sacristan told her the flames curling from the serpent's back were not fire but breath left over from an old quarrel with the monsoon, a quarrel the naga lost every year, which was why it kept puffing steam into the sky.

Mali painted the jaws wide open, teeth bared, because the sacristan said a naga with its mouth shut was only a hill with ambitions. On the last night of the rains the wind came up the river and every bell on the tail rang at once, a sound none of them had ever heard. The sacristan sat on the top step and laughed until he cried, and when he finally lifted his lantern, the paint on the gate was still wet and the gold on the bells had turned a shade brighter, as though the serpent had been drinking.