Black and grey dragon with swirling vines tattooed on a woman's side and hip, worn with a black corset top and checkered skirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and vines on a side hip

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey dragon with outstretched wings and a scaled body curls along the side of the hip, with its head near the lower waist. Fine vines with curling tendrils and small leaf shapes wrap around it. The shading is soft and dense, with strong darks in the wings and body and lighter greys on the skin, and the grey studio backdrop keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Ribs Dragon Vine Wing Leaves Scale

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had told the dragon it was finished. Ottoline kept it folded in the back of the costume wagon, behind the lion cage that had been empty since spring, a long black shape of painted canvas that Father Sabine stitched for the Dunmore Grand Circus back when the big top still had gold fringe. Its wings were folded like umbrellas left out in the rain, and the vines curling round its tail had flaked where the damp got in.

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By October we were playing to eleven people on a Tuesday in Stroud, and two of them were the council man checking our fire certificate. I spent my evenings under a work lamp with a needle and a hank of waxed linen, closing the rips the way my grandmother closed the holes in our socks, one small stitch at a time, while the others counted coins in the kitchen tent and pretended not to listen to the rain.

Ottoline came out with a flask of coffee on the last night in the field, looked at the dragon for a long while, and said it had one more flight in it if we were stupid enough to try. So we were. We hauled it up the rigging at midnight, pegged the wing spars to the centre pole, and waited for a wind that came off the Severn as if it had been saving itself.

When it finally filled, the canvas rose and bellied and turned the whole black length of it into a shape that rolled over the field toward the hedges. Three village children stood on the gate with their mouths open. For perhaps ten seconds the dragon curled above us, its painted leaves shivering, and then the rope snapped and it came down soft in the stubble like a bird that had decided, after all, to rest.