Black ink dragon tattoo with a coiled, swirling body running down the upper back, partly under a striped sun hat.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon tattoo on upper back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dragon with a long, coiled body and clawed legs is tattooed vertically on a person's upper back. The linework is bold and dark, with solid areas of ink and some shading along the body. The subject is shown in close crop with a striped sun hat and a blue patterned strap at the edge of the frame, against a pale, sunlit background.

Japanese Back Dragon Claw

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

Corin Vosper had lit the ovens at Trewidden Lane for thirty years before he noticed the dragon was asleep in the flue. It was the colour of old soot and lay coiled round the brick chimney the way a mooring rope lies on a quay, its clawed feet tucked under its belly. Each morning at four he raked the embers and left the heel of yesterday's loaf on the sill, and each morning the heel was gone.

Keep reading

His wife Mab said he was going soft and that a dragon wanted coal, not crust. She kneaded the first batch with her knuckles white in the flour and did not look up. But the dragon had never asked for coal. When the cold came off the harbour in January and the dough would not rise, Corin would lay his palm on the warm brick and feel it stir, and by six the loaves would swell like sails.

That winter the bakery was sold to a man from the council who meant to pull the chimney down. Corin told the dragon plainly, the way you tell a neighbour the roof is leaking. The dragon said nothing. But before dawn on the last morning the flue roared, and when Mab came down the stairs the whole shop was dusted gold, every loaf risen as tall as a child, and the dragon had curled itself across the doorstep with its head on the threshold and its claws out.

The council man came at nine. He looked at the bread, bought three loaves, and went away without taking the key. Corin still leaves the heel on the sill. Warm smoke sits in the corner of the shop like a cat, and nobody has ever swept it out.