Purple dragon tattoo on upper arm

It had. Tom found it lying in the hollow under the ash trees, coiled so tight around its own body that its tail disappeared beneath its neck. Its wings were folded out to either side like a pair of wet umbrellas, violet where the low sun caught them and blue-black along the ribs. Snow had settled on the spines of its back and never melted there. It did not open its eyes when he came close. It only breathed, and each breath went up in a slow purple thread.

Tom had been told the story his whole life. The dragon had come over the hills the winter his grandfather was a boy, starved and hurt, and the farm had fed it on the last of the barley in exchange for a promise: it would take the foxes and the wolves that went for the lambs, and in return nobody would climb to the top field after dark. For sixty years the bargain held. The lambs lived. The dragon kept its wall.

This winter the lambs were fewer and the barley was gone. Tom stood a long while with the cold in his teeth. Then he went back down and told his mother the dragon was waking, and she said that was because they had forgotten to thank it. The two of them carried a sack of the last oats up between them.

When they came back at dusk the coil had loosened. The dragon lifted one wing, slow as a gate, and let the snow slide off. Its tail curled once around the sack, and then it turned its head and looked at Tom, as if it had been waiting all winter for someone to notice it was there.