Small black ink tattoo of a coiling dragon with a spiral tail on the inner wrist, photographed close up against a dark background.

Small dragon tattoo on the inner wrist

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small dragon with its head near the top curls down into a spiral tail that ends in a dot-like curl. Its body and tail are outlined in solid black linework with spiky, flame-like shapes along the back, and some areas are filled with grey-toned shading. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale wrist, with the palm visible above and a dark background behind.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Gull Skerry had been dark for three nights when my father sent me up the spiral stairs with a tin of paraffin and a hunch that the cloud would lift before dawn. I was eleven. The stairs were iron, slick with salt, and they wound round and round like the tail of something that had given up on climbing.

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At the top the glass was clouded with spray. I wiped a clear circle with my sleeve and saw, out past the reef, a light that was not ours. It moved low on the water, bending and folding, and it had a head. Mrs Hocking in the cottage swore the sea kept a dragon the way it kept a bell under Lantern Rock, and I had always thought she told those stories to keep the children off the rocks.

The thing curled round the wreck of the Amity Rose, a brigantine nobody had reported, and it dipped its head towards the rocks as if it were looking for something it had lost. Its flames trailed off the back of it and went out one by one in the wet air. I filled the lamp. My hands shook so badly I spilled half the paraffin across the boards, and I hardly cared.

By morning the light was back, the cloud gone, and the water flat as a plate. There was no wreck, only a ring of foam and a single brass button that I kept in my pocket. Father never asked what I had seen. He checked the wick, nodded, and said the sea was keeping its own counsel. I still climb those stairs each dusk, and I still look for the spiral in the swell.

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