Colour tattoo of a red dragon wrapped around a dark green orb, with a long curling tail, on a woman's upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red dragon coiled around an orb on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A red dragon with spread wings curls around a dark, glossy orb that has green and gold highlights. A long, thin tail sweeps down and loops beneath the orb. The linework is bold and smooth, with soft shading on the wings, and the red ink stands out against the light skin of the upper back and shoulder.

Shoulder Dragon Orb Wing Tail

Find an artist for this

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 dragon had slept on the hill above Vell for three winters, curled around the dark stone it had carried up from the river, and the village had learned to live with the smell of woodsmoke and singed sheep. Old Tamsin the ferrywoman said the stone was a drowned moon. Her grandson said it was a cooking pot full of eels. Nobody went up to ask.

Keep reading

In the fourth spring a boy named Corran climbed the hill with a basket of bread and a crock of honey, because his mother had told him that a creature who was fed did not burn the barley. He found the dragon awake and watching the path. Its wings were spread like rust-coloured sails over the stone, and its long tail had looped down the slope and back again, so that the boy had to step over it twice.

He set the basket down and did not run. He sat, and he told the dragon about the river mud that had taken his uncle's boat, and about the price of salt, and about his sister who could whistle like a heron. The dragon listened with its head low. When the sun had moved a hand's width across the sky, it reached out one claw and turned the bread over, as if checking the crust.

That autumn the village found the barley standing tall and untouched, and a single green scale, bright as a beetle's back, left on the threshold of the ferry house. Tamsin held it up to the light and said nothing about moons or pots. She only pushed it into Corran's palm and told him to keep it dry.