Colour tattoo of a skeletal dragon with a glowing blue eye and teal and orange wings, in a traditional style, on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal dragon on the side of the body

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A skeletal dragon with a pale blue glowing eye, bony spines and tattered teal wings, drawn with bold black outlines. Shading is limited to flat fills and simple highlights, with teal, blue, orange and tan ink dominating. The dragon sits diagonally across the frame on smooth skin, with its wings extended toward the top edge.

Traditional Other Dragon Skeleton Wing Eye Claw Spike Tail

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the sawdust, because this is about the year the Pier Ballroom lost its power and the dragon came up the stairs to dance. Nobody in Hollin Bay could tell you where the thing had been kept before. Old Mr Teague swore it was bone, every rib of it, cut from a fishmonger's stone sculpture and given wings of blue oilcloth from the tent show. Its eye was a pale lamp somebody had sealed in with wax, and when the hall went dark it lit up like a kettle left on the hob.

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The band that week was Lena Brandt and the Kittiwakes, four women from Grimsby with trumpets that could cut tin. They had a rule: nobody sits out a waltz. So when the lights died at ten past nine, the dragon was the only thing moving on the floor, its claws clicking on the boards, its tail sweeping chairs aside, its wings folding and unfolding like a fan gone wrong. Lena didn't stop playing. She counted the bars under her breath and went on.

By midnight the dragon had partnered every widow on the balcony and trodden on the mayor's toes twice. At the end of the last tune it went out through the open doors, down the slipway and into the grey water, where its eye bobbed out to sea like a buoy for an hour. Then it was gone.

Mr Teague says the oilcloth wings still hang in the tent on Scarrow Sands. Ask anyone who was there, and they'll tell you the dragon didn't leave because the music stopped. It left because the lights came back on.