Dark grey dragon tattoo winding up the calf and across the ankle of a bare leg, resting on a cream bed sheet.

Dragon tattoo on a calf and ankle

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare legs rest on a bed with a cream sheet printed with faint floral motifs. A long, serpentine dragon with wispy whiskers and a feathered tail runs from the ankle up the calf of one leg. The tattoo uses soft, shaded grey-green ink with fine linework, and the composition is a casual close-up of the lower legs.

Find an artist for this

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 Wolcott and Pim Travelling Show had lost its elephant in March and its brass band in June, and by October the only thing still drawing a crowd on the Wisbech fairground was the dragon. Nobody had ever seen a real one, of course. Mr Pim had built it from cane and grey silk the winter before the war ended, and it still ran the length of the tent like smoke off a chimney.

Keep reading

I worked the dragon from underneath, two legs in the silk and a long pole for the head. My job was the whiskers, a dozen strands of horsehair that caught the lamplight and made the whole thing seem to breathe. Every evening I combed them out with a fork and a smear of wax, because Mr Pim said a dragon with tidy whiskers was a dragon nobody paid a penny to see.

The tail was the trouble. Its feathers had faded to the colour of old pond water, and two had split during the Lincoln run. Nobody had the money for pheasant plumes, so on the last night before the lorries went to the scrapyard I sat on an upturned crate with a darning needle and a tin of grey dye and sewed each feather back on, one at a time, while the paraffin lamp hissed beside me.

Mr Pim came in around midnight, looked at the tail for a long while and said nothing. Then he lifted the pole from my hands, raised the dragon over his head and walked it out into the empty ring. It rippled across the sawdust under the stars like something that had finally decided to swim. We folded it together afterwards, the way you would fold a sheet, and the mended feather stayed on top of the pile, grey as smoke, catching the last of the light.

More like this

Traditional style tattoos of red roses, a butterfly and an animal head on the calves of two legs resting on a floral bedsheet.
Traditional roses and animal tattoos on legs
Black and grey dreamcatcher tattoo with feathers and small turquoise gems on the outer thigh of a person lying on a blue bed.
Dreamcatchers and feathers on a thigh
Black and grey peacock feather tattoo with a heart-shaped eye running down a bare leg, placed on the calf.
Peacock feather with heart eye on a leg
Grey shaded dreamcatcher and feather tattoo with small turquoise accents on the thigh of a person lying on blue bedding.
Dreamcatchers and feathers on a thigh
Black and grey tattoo of stacked animal heads, including what appear to be an owl and a deer skull with antlers, on the front of a thigh in a black and white photo.
Stacked animal figures on a thigh
Black lace-pattern tattoo band around the upper thigh, drawn in blackwork and dotwork style, with a bathtub edge visible behind the leg.
Lace band tattoo on a thigh
Black and grey shaded rose with leaves on a thigh, beside fine script lettering on the other leg, with both legs resting in a bath.
Shaded rose and script tattoos on legs
Black and grey shaded octopus tentacles tattoo on the outer thigh of a person in dark underwear, with pink curtains behind.
Octopus tentacles tattoo on a thigh
A leg resting in a green bath shows a colour floral tattoo sleeve of red peonies, pink roses and dark leaves on the calf and thigh.
Floral leg sleeve with peonies and roses
Two lower legs resting on a floral sheet, covered in colour traditional tattoos of roses, a cat head and a butterfly on the calves and shins.
Traditional roses, cat and butterfly on legs
Black and grey realism tattoo of a wolf head with feathers and roses on the thigh.
Wolf, feathers and roses on a thigh
Small black fine line arrow tattoo on the ankle of a person whose hand holds their foot on white bedsheets.
Arrow tattoo on an ankle

From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.