A painterly dragon tattoo in red, orange, blue and yellow across the upper back and shoulder blade area.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and blue dragon on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A dragon with outstretched wings and a long curling tail is tattooed across the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. The linework is loose and feathered, with the wings and body built from splashes and washes rather than solid outlines. Red and orange dominate the wings, with blue edging and yellow accents along the tail, and the composition curls down towards the lower shoulder.

Back Dragon Wing Tail

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wool must soak before the colour will take, so you keep the cauldron at a low simmer and your arms in it until your fingers wrinkle like figs left in the sun. Master Anaxo has told you twice already that you work too quickly. Madder root goes in first, a rust that the alum turns to fire, and only then the woad, dipped and lifted and dipped again so the blue creeps up through the red without drowning it.

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The commission arrives on a Tuesday: a sail for the grain ship Nereid, bound for Ostia before the autumn gales. The owner wants a dragon, wings flung wide, its tail coiling down toward the hem. Anaxo hands you a brush and tells you there will be no charcoal line. Let the colour find the edges, he says, and it will show you where the bones of the wing want to be. So you wash the wings in scarlet, let it bleed into orange at the tips, then drag thin blue ridges along the leading edges until they look like cloud breaking over a ridge. Where the tail curls you touch in weld-yellow, one bead of it, the last thing you do before dark.

When the sail is hung at the yard and the wind fills it, the dragon seems to lift off the canvas and turn its head toward the sea. Dockhands stop with their baskets on their shoulders. Anaxo says nothing for a long while, then takes a rag from his belt, wets it, and wipes a spatter of red from your cheekbone, slow and careful, the way you would clean a child's face.

For a month afterwards the colour stays with you. Scarlet sits in the creases of your knuckles, blue under your nails, a faint gold on your wrists where the weld ran. When the harbour women ask what you have been painting, you hold up your hands and let them look, because there is no better answer than that.