Black and grey Japanese style dragon coiled around a sword with red accents, tattooed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and sword on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dragon with a horned head and scaled body coils around a long sword with a pointed blade and a looped hilt. The linework is bold and the scales and dragon's mane are shaded in grey, with small red gems adding accent colour. The design runs diagonally down the forearm against a dark, glossy background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp went out a second time before the supper plates were cleared, and Tom Ferris swore the wick had been bitten through. I told him the sea has no teeth. He only pointed at the window, where the swell was climbing the rock below us in long grey coils, scale over scale, the way a thing moves when it has been asleep for a hundred years and is deciding whether to wake.

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I took the Maud Calloway's cutlass off its nail, the one with the rope-bound grip and the two red stones a Lisbon trader swore were rubies, and climbed the iron stairs in my stockinged feet so the dragon would not hear me coming. At the gallery rail I laid the blade flat against the glass housing. Light from the reflector ran along its fuller and struck out across the water, and the coil below stopped its climbing. A horned head rose out of the foam with its mane streaming, and in the flash of the beam its eyes were the same deep red as the stones in my hand.

We kept each other company until the glass cleared. It did not want the sword. It wanted the light kept lit, which is all any of us wants from a lighthouse, and I understood then why the last keeper had painted the lamp room door red. By grey dawn there was only weed and a drowned hawser on the rocks, and a long bright scrape on the iron rail where something had held on. Tom asked where the blade had gone. I told him it was still on the gallery, where it belongs, and that the wick had not been bitten at all.

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