Black and grey dragon tattoo with a detailed head and scaled body wrapping from the hip down the outer thigh.

Dragon tattoo across hip and thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with an open-mouthed head, whiskers and clawed feet curls from the hip down the outer thigh. The linework is fine and the scales are shaded in greys, with strong contrast in the head and a highlight across the body. The dark tiled background keeps the focus on the tattoo, which fills most of the frame.

Japanese Thigh Dragon Scale Claw Whiskers Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The showman wants the dragon grey, not green, because green screams under the lamps and grey sits still for the whole season. You have three nights before the fair reaches Hull, a canvas the size of a barn door stretched between two lorries, and a pot of Indian ink that has already thickened in the cold.

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Every evening you work from the bottom up. First the claws, hooked over the tent pole, then the long body coiling round the ticket hut, scale by scale, each one a small crescent you dot with a brush that has lost half its bristles. Old Mr Tallis watches from his folding chair with a flask on his knee and says nothing until you reach the head.

At the head he stands up. The jaws are open wide enough to swallow a child's balloon, the whiskers thin as wire, the horns swept back like a pair of oars. 'Leave a white stripe down the spine,' he says, 'so the crowd thinks the rain has been on it.' You do, one clean stroke of bare canvas where the lamp will catch it.

When the generators are switched off and the lorries pull out at dawn, you look back from the cab. The dragon is still coiled round the ticket hut, grey on grey, and the stripe along its back shines wet in the first light, as if it has only just stopped moving.