Full sleeve Japanese-style dragon tattoo in grey and red with red flames, shown on the upper arm and forearm of a shirtless man.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon sleeve with red flames

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two arms are shown side by side, each covered by a full sleeve featuring a grey dragon with red eyes, open jaws and detailed scales. Red flame and smoke shapes curl around the dragon heads, with grey cloud forms and shading at the lower forearm. The shading is smooth and layered, and the composition fills the frame from the shoulder to the wrist.

Japanese Realism Upper arm Forearm Shoulder Dragon Flame Cloud Sleeve Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishermen of Hollin Skerry said the sea dragon Ushiro had been asleep under the grey cloud for three hundred years, and that the red fire in the water was only his breath when he dreamed of the old harbour. Nobody on the island believed it except Mara Dunmore's grandmother, who kept a brass bell on a string by her door and rang it each evening at the turn of the tide.

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When the storm came in the autumn of the great drought, the boats did not come home. Mara was fourteen and had rowed out alone to find her brother's skiff, which had been tied to the wrong buoy. She found it in the fog, its painter cut clean, and beside it the water began to glow red from below, the way the grandmother had described and no one had ever seen. Something long and grey lifted its head out of the swell, its eyes like two coals in a banked hearth, its jaws open wide enough to take the whole skiff.

Mara did not scream. She held up the bell, which she had brought without knowing why, and rang it once. The dragon paused. Smoke rolled from its nostrils and wrapped around the boat like a wet blanket, and through it she heard the boy's voice calling from the far rocks, safe and cold and alive.

She brought the skiff and her brother home by dawn. The dragon went back under and the fog went with it, leaving the harbour bright and quiet. Her grandmother only nodded and hung the bell back on its nail, saying the old ones always preferred to be asked before they were answered.