Close-up of a grey shaded dragon tattoo running down the left side of a torso, beside the navel, on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey dragon on a side torso

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A grey dragon with spined wings and a long curling tail runs vertically down the side of the abdomen, beside the navel. The linework is dark and defined, with shading in several grey tones giving the body and wings depth. The image is framed close on the torso, with hands lifting a dark top and red-trimmed dark shorts below.

Ribs Dragon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog had come down over Scarra so thick that Marit could not see the end of the quay, only the lantern her father had hung on the gate post, swaying like a drowned moon. Nine boats were still out past the Kettle Rocks. She heard them before she saw anything: oars knocking, a man calling a name that was not his own, the flat slap of water against a hull that sat too low in the sea.

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Her grandmother had told her the old story at the hearth, the way you tell a thing you do not quite believe. The dragon of Scarra slept under the north cliff, grey as wet slate, its wings ribbed with spines like the bones of a herring. It had not hunted in four generations. It did not need to. It ate the wrack and the weather and kept its tail curled round the island the way a cat keeps a kitten.

Marit went down the steps to the lowest stone and did what her grandmother had done, which was to stop talking and start singing the old net-menders' song, badly, into the dark. For a long time nothing answered. Then the fog stirred at the foot of the cliff, a shape unfolding, a long grey length of tail slipping over the rocks and into the shallows like a rope being paid out.

By dawn all nine boats were tied up along the wall, and the sea had left a pale curling line of weed along the stone, as neat as a signature. Her father walked the quay twice before he would believe it. Marit only pulled her shawl tighter and watched the cliff, where something had turned over in its sleep and gone quiet again.