Black blackwork tattoo of a crescent with a small dragon head near the hairline, sitting behind a person's ear with a silver hoop earring.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and crescent tattoo behind the ear

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of an ear with a bold black crescent tattoo curving from above the ear down behind it, with a small dragon head detailed at the top near the hairline. The linework is solid black with a thin inner line along the crescent, and the dragon shows finer detail in its head and features. The image is entirely black ink on skin, with a silver hoop earring in the lobe and the ear filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Other Dragon Crescent Tribal pattern Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the windfalls, they bruise like a grudge. This is the orchard at Hollin Cross, where the old pear trees lean on each other like drunk men at a wedding, and this is the reason we never prune the top bough of the Mother Tree. Nobody remembers who planted it. Everybody remembers the dragon.

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Her name was Vesk, or so the wind says when it comes through the rows in August. She was no bigger than a hunting dog when she first came up the lane, and she wanted nothing but the late sweet fruit. Ada Penhallow, the farmer's daughter, left her a bowl of windfalls on the wall stone each evening, and each morning the bowl was licked clean and the stone was scored with three small claw marks, the way a cat marks a doorframe to say I was here.

Then came the autumn the moon hung so low over the Mother Tree that it snagged on the top bough and began to slide. You could hear it groaning in the dark, the whole pale orb tilting towards the cider press. Vesk climbed the tree in a single coil, took the moon's lower rim in her jaws, and held on. All night her scales glowed like a forge, and the frost that settled on her turned to steam. By dawn the moon had a clean curved bite out of its edge, and Vesk was gone, leaving only a bowl turned upside down on the wall.

Ada swore the bite grew back a little each month, the way a mouth closes on a sweet. And if you look up at the thin moon in late summer, when the apples are down and the wasps have given up, you can still see the curve of her coil at the rim, and a small head turned back towards the orchard, as if checking we are minding the windfalls. So eat them before they bruise.