Black and grey skeletal dragon tattoo with ribbed wings and a long curled tail, across the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal dragon on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A skeletal dragon with spread, mesh-like wings and a long segmented tail runs diagonally across the outer thigh. The linework is bold and dark, with heavy black shading on the wing membranes and bones and softer grey tones on the ribcage and limbs. The tattoo fills most of the frame against plain skin with a dark background at the edge.

Thigh Dragon Skeleton Wing Tail Ribcage Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bones came up out of the peat on the Tuesday after the gale, and by Thursday half of Harrow Holm had walked out to look at them. Old Ailsa Brough was the first to touch the ribs, and she said they were warm, which was nonsense, and then she said it again, which was worse.

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I was the one with the spade, so the Council sent me to dig the thing out properly. It lay curled along the dune like a creature that had meant to fly and had stopped halfway through the sentence. The wing bones spread out over the marram grass, and the membranes between them had gone to lace, every hole in them the size of a thumbprint and rimmed with black where the weather had burned them. I counted forty-one vertebrae in the tail before I lost my nerve and stopped counting.

The turn came on the fourth night. I was sitting by the cut with a lamp and a flask of tea, and the tide was out, and I heard something click along the spine, one segment after another, like a man running a stick along a fence. I did not go to look. In the morning the tail had moved a yard further towards the water, and the sand where it had lain was scored with five long furrows, each one ending in a claw.

Nobody on the island believes me, and I have stopped minding. The ferry comes on Thursdays. Last week a woman from the mainland asked me what the holm was called, and I told her the truth, which is that it had been called Harrow for four hundred years and nobody had ever asked why. She laughed, and I laughed, and then I went down to the shore and sat with the bones until the light went, because somebody had to keep count.