Black and grey dragon with red flame swirls tattooed down the side of a torso and hip, in Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon with red flames on the side

Japanese · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A dragon with outstretched wings and a coiling serpentine body is tattooed along the side of the torso, running down over the hip towards the thigh. The dragon is shaded in black and grey with fine hatched linework, while swirling red flames wrap around the body and wings. The photograph is taken from the side against a plain pale wall, with the design filling most of the frame.

Japanese Ribs Thigh Dragon Flame Wing Serpent Swirl

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 kiln had cooled overnight, and Kallias found the amphora on the workbench with its black slip gone dull at the shoulder, as if someone had breathed on it. He had painted the beast himself: a long serpent wound round the neck, wings lifted toward the lip, and flames in red ochre that seemed to stream off the clay like smoke from a torch. Demetria, who sold oil at the harbour, had commissioned it for her husband's tomb at Phaleron, and she had insisted on a dragon because a dragon knows the road to the dead and will not be lost on it.

Keep reading

He did not believe in roads for the dead, but he believed in paint, and that night he heard a dry scraping from the back room. When he lit the lamp the vase was rocking gently on its foot. The serpent had slid down the clay and its tail hung over the rim, and the red strokes around it were wet, shining, as though they had only just been laid. Kallias sat on an upturned crate until the lamp burned low, watching the flames lift and settle and lift again, and he thought of nothing useful.

In the morning he carried the amphora down to the harbour on a handcart. Demetria took one look at it and shook her head. Her husband, she said, had always been restless, and the dragon had clearly gone walking without him. She would not pay for a thing that had been out in the night, so Kallias bought it back for a single drachma and carried it home with his arms aching.

He set it on the shelf and painted a smaller serpent on the flagstones beside the door, curling it toward the sea so it could keep the first one company. Each morning after that, there were red marks on the threshold, faint and dry, leading down towards the water.