Black and grey realistic dragon biting its own tail in a circle, tattooed across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon coiled in a circle on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dragon's head and body form a ring, with its jaws meeting its tail around a large shaded circle at the centre. The scales and spines are rendered with fine linework and dark, heavy shading, while the inner circle uses soft grey gradients to suggest depth. The design is in black and grey and is centred on the upper back, filling most of the frame.

Realism Back Dragon Circle Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the carter at Hollin Gap swears the moon has been caught again. Last night I climbed up past the shepherd's hut with the lamp, and the whole round of it hung over the saddle like a coin in a well. Around its rim the old dragon was lying as it always does, head bent back, teeth at its own tail, the spines along its back catching the light so every one of them looked sharp enough to cut a hand.

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Mother says it's only a story the drovers tell to keep the children from wandering up the pass after dark. She says the dragon is mostly tired, that it has been biting its tail so long it forgets which end it started from. I told her I didn't believe her and she laughed and gave me the good bread. But I went up anyway, and I sat on the cold stone until the grey light came, and I watched the circle of the moon grow soft at the edges the way breath does on glass.

At dawn the dragon's jaw had opened a finger's width. I swear it. The moon inside had a crack down its middle, a faint silver seam like the fold line on a letter, and out of the seam came a smell of rain that had not yet fallen anywhere. I wrote the wool tally on the back of your last letter and put the stub of pencil in my mouth to think, and when I looked up the jaw had closed again.

I am going to stay up there the next two nights. If the seam widens, I will send word down with the mule boy, and you will know it is not my imagination. If it does not, then I am only a fool who has been up a mountain too long, and you can tell Mother she was right about the bread.