Photo of a flying red dragon tattoo with black outlines on the upper back near the shoulder, with a grey tribal tattoo to the left.

Red dragon tattoo on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A flying dragon with outstretched wings and a long, wavy tail is drawn in black outline and filled with red ink on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. The linework is bold and even, with simple red shading along the wings and body. A smaller grey tribal design sits to the left, and the photo is taken outdoors against green foliage.

Traditional Back Shoulder Dragon Wing Tail Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came over the orchard on the last Thursday of August, when the Bramley apples were swelling red on the boughs and the wasps had given up on the windfalls. Old Hanne Corran was up a ladder with a basket on her hip, and she did not look up at first, because the shadow that crossed the grass was no bigger than a crow's.

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It was not a crow. It was red as a split plum, with black lines drawn along its wings as though someone had gone over them with a pen, and its tail trailed behind it in three long waves like a river that had decided to fly. It circled the orchard twice, then folded its wings and dropped onto the wall by the gate, where it hooked its claws into the stone and watched her pick. "You're in my trees," said Hanne. "I am in the sky above them," said the dragon, "and the sky is older than your trees, so the apples are not yours either."

She thought about that while she filled the basket. The orchard had gone dry that summer and the well was low, and dragons get thirsty like anyone, so she carried the bucket to the stone trough and set it down by the wall. The dragon drank for a long time. When it lifted its head, water ran off its jaw and spotted the dust red.

It left in the evening with a sack of bruised windfalls hooked in one foreclaw. Next morning the bark on the eastern row was marked with small red scratches where the wings had brushed past, and every high apple had been left for the blackbirds, while the low ones had each been bitten once, neat as a horseshoe.