Colour tattoo of a red dragon breathing a fireball in a neo-traditional style, running down the side of a torso over the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red dragon breathing fire on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large red dragon with yellow spines and green eyes breathes a fireball, with a blue and white spiral shape behind its head and body. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft shading on the scales and small red splashes near the dragon's neck. The tattoo fills the side of the torso, which is shown from the side against a dark background.

Neo-trad Ribs Dragon Fire Spiral Blood Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, you with the wet boots, for the wheel at Hesketh Weir turned three hundred years on the breath of a red dragon called Scarrow, and nobody in the kingdom of Lessary ever saw her face without a bucket of water at their feet. She lived in the old lead mine above the mill, where the shafts coiled like rope round a drum, and each dawn she crept out to warm her belly on the iron of the great wheel. The millers paid her in salt pork and keeping quiet.

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The winter the river froze, the spokes locked solid and the barley began to sprout in the sacks. Tobin Ashe, who kept the sluice gate and had no sense of his own weight, climbed the hill with a sickle and a lantern and stood at the mouth of the shaft. Scarrow came up slowly, spines lit yellow as struck brass, green eyes narrowed. What do you want, boy? I want the wheel turning, he said. Then pay me, she said. One drop of what runs in you, and I will give you the fire that breaks ice.

He had cut his thumb on the sickle before he could think better of it. The drop fell on her tongue and hissed. She lifted her head and drew in the cold air until her ribs glowed, and then a fireball rolled out of her jaws, heavy and bright as a bushel of embers, and burst against the frozen wheel. The ice cracked like musket shot, the water roared down the race, and the great blue-white spiral of the sluice began to turn, slow and then faster, flinging spray across the mill yard.

Scarrow went back into the hill without a word of thanks. In spring the miller's daughters still find one red scale on the sill of the sluice house, warm to the touch, and Tobin never again sold tallow to anyone who came asking for dragons.