Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a red and orange dragon head with grey horns across the upper arm and shoulder.

Red and orange dragon on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large dragon head dominates the upper arm, with a scaled body curling down beneath it and smaller wings or limbs at the edges. Bold dark outlines and smooth shading give the scales and horns depth, and a soft grey smoke-like wash sits behind the design. Reds, oranges and yellows dominate the palette, with white-grey accents on the horns and beard, and the design fills the frame against a plain street background.

Neo-trad Upper arm Dragon Horn Scale Wing Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The debt had been paid in lamp oil, three barrels of it rolled up the scree road by the miller's boys, and Ottoline Hask still did not trust it. The dragon sat with his chin on the lip of the quarry, his grey beard lifting in the wind off the tarn, and watched the boys tip the last barrel over the edge. They had been told he liked his tallow warm. They had been told a great many things about Brannoch, most of them by their grandmothers.

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He had not eaten a sheep in forty years. In that time he had eaten two bailiffs, one tithe man who deserved it, and a cart of turnips that had wandered too near his cave. Now he unfolded one wing, slowly, the way an old man stands from a chair, and the ridges along his neck clicked like a comb being drawn through wet hair. "The bell," he said. "Read me the terms again, miller's girl. You have your grandfather's mouth for lying, but not his eyes."

Ottoline read them. The village owed him a bell, cast in the year the foundry burned, when his heat had kept the bronze liquid for a night and a day. The village had never paid. Brannoch looked at the oil, then at the grey smoke gathering over the valley, then at the small brass bell the boys had dragged up beside the barrels, green at the lip and still smelling of the forge. He lowered his head until his horns scraped the rock. Then he breathed out, gently, a warm red sigh that lit the oil and went up in a column the whole valley could see.

By dusk the bell hung from the old oak above the mill, and it rang across the tarn each time the wind turned. Brannoch's beard glowed for an hour afterwards, white at the tips, and nobody in Coldharbour mentioned the scorched patch on the quarry road that would take years to grow back.