Shaded purple and black dragon tattoo in flight across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple dragon across a shoulder blade

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A large flying dragon with outstretched wings and a curling tail covers the upper back, arching from the shoulder blade towards the spine. The wings and body use dark linework with purple and red shading that fades into grey and black, giving the scales and membrane a textured, dimensional look. The dragon sits against plain skin with a blurred background, and the person's head and face are outside the frame.

Back Dragon Wing Tail Flying

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, The big top came down on Tuesday in a wind that didn't care who was standing under it, and Father Desmond has sold the dragon's wing frame to a scrapman in Ludlow because the man pays by weight. You'll say I should have stopped him. I tried. I stood on the flatbed with a wing rib in my arms until the driver asked whether I was coming along with it.

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The dragon was your idea, remember, the summer you were eleven and borrowed Mother's purple dye for the drop cloth. Thirty years of rain had turned the membrane from violet to the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and the scales you painted along the seams had flaked to grey. Still, when the lamps went up at dusk and it lifted off its pole, the whole field went quiet, the way a crowd does before it decides whether to clap.

Last night I climbed up to the empty pole and sat there with the tail coiled across my knees. It is lighter than you'd think, stitched leather over wire, and I found the place where your initials are burned into the tip with a soldering iron. Nobody has ever paid to see a dragon with a name on its tail, but nobody has asked me to stop looking at it either.

I'm posting the tail to you in Leeds. Don't frame it. Hang it where the morning light catches the purple, and let it fly once a year, indoors, with the windows shut. Your sister, Ilse.