Colour tattoo of a purple and black dragon in a realistic style across a person's upper back, with orange and pink clouds behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple dragon across upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A winged dragon with a long barbed tail is shown in flight across the upper back. Its scales and wing membranes are shaded with smooth gradients and fine detail, and the dark body contrasts with the violet wings. Soft orange, pink and blue clouds fill the background, and the design is centred between the shoulder blades.

Realism Back Dragon Wing Cloud Tail Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wings were the last thing Mother Vane let me touch before the wagons went to auction. Forty yards of violet canvas on ash ribs, and nobody had oiled them since the fire at Bridgnorth. Each night that October I climbed the rigging above the empty field with a pot of linseed and a brush, and each night the wind found another hole to whistle through.

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The dragon itself was painted by a man called Ansel, who drank his wages and never signed anything. He gave it a body the colour of a wet slate roof and a tail that ended in a barb like a fishhook. Mother Vane used to say the trick was the sky behind it. Ansel daubed orange and rose and a bruised blue until the crowd forgot the canvas was only canvas. Now the only people who came to the field were a farmer's three boys and a collie that barked at the guy ropes.

On the last Saturday the wire had rusted through at one end, and I had to decide whether to fly her at all. I did it anyway, at dusk, with the boys holding the ropes and the collie for once silent. The sun sank behind the hedge exactly as Ansel had painted it, and for a minute the real clouds and the painted clouds were the same colour.

The dragon lifted off the grass, dragged its tail through the nettles, and rose above the hedge with the wind pouring through holes I had not managed to mend. Mother Vane stood in the caravan doorway with her hand over her mouth. When the dragon finally settled on the stubble, the boys cheered as though it had been the plan all along. I walked home that night with violet to my elbows and the clean, tired feeling of having finished something.