Watercolour-style tattoo of a dragon's head and wing above a sword on the calf, with a black silhouette and pink and purple wash.

Dragon and sword on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A dragon head with an open jaw and a wing sit above a sword with a blade pointing down and to the left. The dragon and sword are rendered as dark, soft-edged silhouettes with thin, sketchy lines around the wing. Pink and purple washes fade out around the black ink, giving a loose, painterly effect against the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At three in the morning the ward smelled of antiseptic and cold toast, and Nell Achterberg had stopped hearing the drip alarm at bed six. She was holding a paper cup of tea she had forgotten to drink when Arthur Penhale rang his bell for the third time.

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He wasn't in pain, he said. He wanted the book. It was a battered paperback his granddaughter had left on the locker, a story about a dragon that came down from the Pennines every winter to guard a sword planted point-first in a frozen lake. Nell read by the dim lamp, skipping the long bits about the village, while Arthur's lips moved a line ahead of her.

At the chapter where the knight rides out, she stopped. "Does it win?" she asked. Arthur kept his eyes shut. "Dragons don't win. They wait. The sword was never for the knight. It was her mother's, and she'd rather go hungry than let anyone pull it out."

He was asleep before the next page. Nell closed the book on her finger and went to the window. Frost furred the car park, and beyond the fence the road lights blinked orange over nothing. She switched off the lamp. In the dark the cover was just a shape, black wings folded over a blade that pointed down, and she set it back on the locker where he could reach it.

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