Full sleeve tattoo of a grey Japanese dragon with red flames on a man's arm, shown from shoulder to wrist in two views.

Japanese dragon full sleeve with red flames

Japanese · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large dragon covers the whole arm, with its head near the elbow and its body wrapping up towards the shoulder. The linework is detailed and the scales and whiskers are shaded in black and grey, with fine highlights on the teeth and eyes. Red flame shapes run along the arm and provide the only strong colour against the greyscale ink.

Japanese Realism Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Dragon Flame Scale Claw Horn Eye Teeth

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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

You climb the broken stair of Harrowmere Keep with grit in your collar, the gatehouse clerk shouting after you that nobody has come back down from the top tower in forty years. The dragon was cut into the lintel above the great door by masons who fled the siege before the roof fell in. Its body runs up the stone like a cord of muscle, its scales cut so finely that frost settles in every one, and its jaw opens over the arch with teeth bared at anyone who passes beneath.

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The hall is open to the sky. A cold hearth sits in the middle, ringed with black ash, and a bronze bell hangs from a single chain in the rafters. You are halfway across the flagstones when a scale the size of a cartwheel shield drops at your feet, and you look up. The carved eyes above the arch have gone the colour of embers. Smoke curls from the nostrils, and the painted flames along the cornice begin to breathe.

It speaks in the voice of wet rock. It asks what a farmer's child wants with its bell, and you tell it the wells in the valley have been dry since midsummer, and your mother sent you to every ruin in the county for anything that might call rain. The dragon is silent for so long that the bell starts to hum on its chain. Then its claws come down the wall, unhook the bell with a tap like a sigh, and drop the iron tongue into your palm. 'Strike it once at the river,' it says, 'and the water will remember its old road.'

You carry the bell down the hill with the clapper wrapped in your scarf so it cannot ring early. Behind you the great door groans shut. When you reach the valley you look back, and the lintel is only stone again, grey and cold, its flames gone out one by one like lamps in a long corridor.