Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon tattoo across a stomach

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A torso photograph showing a large dragon-like design in fine grey linework across the abdomen, with wispy cloud forms around it. Further tattoos are partly visible on the upper arm and the thigh at the frame edges, though their designs are cropped. The image has warm, soft lighting, and the subject's face is out of frame.

Other Upper arm Thigh Dragon Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the monastery's bell for forty winters, and he told the novices that a dragon lives wherever the mist sits low on the hills. You will not see it, he said, but you will feel the cold it brings. The boys did not believe him, so one night in the dry month of harvest, when the cloud lay thin over the orchard, he took them out past the wall to the stone where the old well was.

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The well had gone dry the summer before, and a wooden lid had been nailed over it. Anselm pried the lid off with his stick and bade them lean in. Down in the dark there was a sound like a long breath being drawn, and then a curl of pale vapour rose out of the shaft and hung in the air above them, shaped like the body of a creature that turned its head slowly to look at them. The novices stepped back. Anselm did not.

"That is the one who keeps the rain," he said. "When the monks forget to pray for it, it sulks and goes down into the earth, and the wells go dry. When we remember it, it rises and goes back up to the high places, and it leaves its scales behind us in the clouds."

The youngest novice, a boy called Tobiah with ink on his fingers, asked whether the dragon had ever harmed anyone. Anselm laughed, and the bell in the tower sounded for vespers, and the mist moved off over the wall like a long grey sleeve. "Only the ones who forget their manners," he said, and went in to pray for rain.