Two matching black dragon tattoos on the inner wrists and forearms, mirrored so the dragons face each other.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching mirrored dragons on two wrists

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two near-identical dragon designs sit on the inner wrists of two arms, with each dragon mirroring the other. The bold black linework forms a sinuous neck, a small horned head, outstretched wings and a curling tail. The design is solid black ink on pale skin, and the arms are photographed close up against a plain background.

Blackwork Forearm Dragon Wing Tail Horn Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the Saltgate market the rain came sideways off the estuary, and Nell Corrigan had been selling wet pears for two hours when the tinker across the aisle set down a pair of iron brackets and said, "I think these were your father's." Each bracket was a black dragon's neck rising from a flat plate, and when she turned them in her hands they fitted together like two halves of a heart.

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Her father had forged them the winter before he went to sea, she remembered, by lamplight in the smithy behind the chapel. He had told her the dragons were mirror images because one was meant to guard the left door of the house and the other the right, and that a thing made in pairs only held if both halves knew where the other was. She had laughed at him. She had also kept the brackets wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of a chest for nine years.

The tinker had found them in a pawned crate in Dunmore, he said, with a wing snapped off the right one. Nell ran her thumb along the break and then along the plate beneath the left dragon, where her father's square capitals had scratched a single word: HOME. The other plate was blank.

She paid the tinker in pears and hung the left dragon on the nail above her stall. When the rain eased she walked the length of the market with the broken one in her coat pocket, its jagged wing pricking her ribs at every step, until she reached the forge at the top of Quay Street, where the shutter was still down and someone inside was singing badly over a fire.