Colour tattoo of a red three-headed dragon curled inside a circle with black outlines, across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red three-headed dragon in a circle on a back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo of a red dragon with three heads and outstretched wings fills a circular design across the upper back. Bold black outlines define the scales, claws and wing membranes, with shading that moves from deep red to darker purple-red at the edges. The circle is centred on the back and the photo is taken from behind in a tiled room.

Traditional Back Dragon Wing Circle Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias had been told the pattern would not survive the pour, and by two in the morning on the third night he had stopped arguing with the wax. Three heads on one spine, wings folded so the whole thing would close into a circle. Master Orrin had sketched it on the back of a bill of lading and pinned it above the furnace door, saying a bell carried whatever you cast into its shoulder, whether you meant it to or not.

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The bronze went in at first light, orange as a yolk, and Tobias walked the rim of the mould with a wet rag, wiping sweat from his lip. Where the left head met the edge the metal ran thin and he swore quietly, the way Orrin had taught him. Then the dross lifted off, and the whole circle showed through the cooling clay like a seal pressed into candle wax: the wings sharp, each claw with its own bead of shadow.

They hung the bell at Saltford in March. Nobody came to hear it struck except the sexton and a boy flying a kite in the churchyard. When the clapper first swung, the note came out lower than Tobias had planned, a rough red-brown sound that seemed to wander among the gravestones looking for something it had lost. Orrin said it was the dragon's voice. Tobias said it was a flaw in the tin. They argued about it for thirty years.

On the morning Orrin died the bell rang once by itself, one deep stroke, though the wind was still. Tobias climbed the tower with a lamp and found the clapper hanging motionless, the three heads of the casting turned toward the river as though they had caught a scent. He laid his palm flat against the metal. It was warm, and it hummed, like something that had been waiting to be asked.