Black and grey realism full back tattoo of a dragon above a yin yang symbol, set among carved-looking clouds, waves and a Greek key border.

Dragon and yin yang full back piece

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A full back tattoo shows a large dragon with its head raised above a yin yang symbol inside a bagua-style disc, surrounded by clouds, waves and claws. The shading is smooth and highly detailed, and the design is rendered to resemble carved, cracked stone relief. The composition fills the whole back, with a Greek key band at the top and a pair of dragons at the bottom, all in black and grey ink.

Realism Back Dragon Yin yang Cloud Wave Claw

Find an artist for this

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

The block came up the river on a flat barge in March, wrapped in wet sacking, and when the sacking came off the whole yard went quiet. A hairline crack ran from one corner almost to the middle. Lu Hong ran his thumb along it and said nothing for so long that Mei thought he had decided to send the stone back. Then he rapped the face twice with a wooden mallet and listened, the way a doctor listens to a chest.

Keep reading

They worked it through the dry months. Mei roughed out the clouds first, those curled scrolls that Lu insisted must look blown into the stone rather than carved, then the waves along the lower edge, row after row of tight crests. The dragon came last. She spent eleven days on its mane alone, paring the ridges back until the lamplight caught them, and every morning the crack had crept a little further, down past the claws and into the water.

'Recut it,' she said at the end of July, when the seam had reached the disc at the centre. Lu shook his head. 'The stone has already told us where the rain should go. We are only drawing the map.' He made her leave the yin and yang exactly as it was, dark and light curving around each other, with the crack running straight through the middle.

The first monsoon came in September. Mei stood under the eaves and watched water find the seam, slip down the dragon's jaw and run off the edge of the waves in threads of silver. By morning the dust had washed from every groove, and the whole stone looked wet and alive, as if the dragon had been drinking all night.