Black and grey Japanese style dragon tattoo covering a man's back, with swirling clouds and scaled body detail.

Dragon back piece in black and grey

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with an open-mouthed head and whiskered snout spans the upper and middle back, its long body coiling across the shoulder blades and down towards the waist. The linework is bold with soft grey shading, and the scales are rendered as ridged bands along the body. Wispy cloud forms fill the background, and the image is in black and grey with no colour ink.

Japanese Back Dragon Cloud Scale Back piece Whiskers

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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

The lift doesn't stop at the children's ward after eleven, so you take the stairs with the torch clipped to your lanyard, counting landings the way your gran counted beads. Ward 6 is dim, lit only by the nightlight over the sluice and the blue hum of the fish tank in the play corner. In bed four, Kieran has been awake since the consultant's visit, staring at the ceiling where someone has stuck glow-in-the-dark stars in the wrong constellations.

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He doesn't want a lullaby. He wants the dragon story, the one you make up on nights like this. So you tell him about a dragon that lived in the clouds above the car park, because the hospital roof was the nearest thing to sky it could find. Its body was so long it coiled from the top of the building down past the bins, and its scales were ridged like the bands on a pine trunk, so the rain ran off it in threads. Kieran asks what it was called. You say nobody ever learned its name, but it had whiskers that curled like smoke and a mouth open wide enough to hold the whole night.

He holds out his hand for the biro on the tray table. He draws on the back of a menu card, whiskers first, then the long ridged body crossing the paper in loops, the clouds fat and grey around it. He asks whether it breathes fire. You tell him no, it was too busy keeping watch. Each time a light went on in a window, it blew a cloud across to hide the ward from the frost.

At the three o'clock obs round you find the drawing taped above his bed, the dragon's head pointing at the door. Kieran is asleep with his mouth open in the same shape. You check his pulse, dim the torch, and leave the door ajar so the dragon can see down the corridor.