Black and grey realism tattoo of an open-mouthed dragon head with bared teeth and spiked horns, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic dragon head on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling dragon head with its jaws wide open, showing rows of sharp teeth and a large eye above the snout. The scales, horn ridges and spines are shaded with smooth gradients and fine highlights in black and grey ink. The head fills the frame vertically on a limb, with a dark background and part of a blue sleeve at the left edge.

Realism Forearm Dragon Teeth Horn Spike Scale Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell had told Nell three times not to touch the figurehead in the back parlour, so naturally Nell was standing on a chair with a duster when the lodgers' clock struck six. The dragon's head had come off the Marigold the winter she broke up on the Gullhaven bar, and it hung above the mantel with its jaws wide, grey with a hundred years of coal smoke. Its eye was a glass bead that caught the lamp and made it look as if it were watching the door.

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The dust on its brow came away under her cloth and showed a ridge of scales, each one cut with a fine knife and rubbed smooth by somebody's thumb. She reached along the upper jaw for the catch Mr Pell had always swore did not exist. Something clicked. The lower jaw dropped a finger's width, and a breath of cold air came out of the throat, smelling of tar and wet rope.

Mrs Pell stood in the doorway with a tray of cocoa and no expression at all. "Forty years I've kept him shut," she said. "Harold said a dragon that opens its mouth wants feeding." Nell looked at the teeth, carved from ships' bolts, and thought of the coins she had been skimming from the gas meter.

She dropped one in. The jaws closed with a sound like a door slammed in another house, and from somewhere under the floorboards came a long, contented creak, as if the sea had finally been paid. Mrs Pell set the cocoa down on the mantel. "Right," she said. "Now he'll want the rent."