Back view of a woman showing a large black and grey St George and dragon tattoo across her back, with a colour floral sleeve on her upper arm.

St George and dragon across a back

Blackwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo shows a knight on a horse with a lance attacking a dragon, with patterned linework, solid black fills and stippled texture across the back. The upper arm carries a colour piece of green leaves and pink blossom. The woman is photographed from behind against a bookshelf, with her face not visible.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Upper arm Horse Dragon Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, the bench is only cold on the left side. You want the story or you want to stand there with your stamp? The stamp will keep. My grandmother kept this crossing when the river still ran over the bridge and the guards were drunk by noon. She told me about the knight who came over the ridge on a grey horse, with a lance as long as a barge pole and a face like a shuttered window.

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He had no papers. The clerk in the hut asked for his name and he gave only the name of his saint, George, which the clerk did not think counted as a nation. The dragon was lying in the reeds below the weir, coiled the way a rope coils when someone has tied it badly, its back scaled over with the little curled waves they carve on the lintels in Orsa. It had been eating the sheep of three villages, and it had a taste, the old woman said, for official seals, because one spring it swallowed the mayor's wax and never gave it back.

The knight rode down through the rushes. The horse found firm ground where the grass gave way to mud, and the lance went in under the foreleg, once, and the whole marsh went quiet as a sealed envelope. My grandmother said the dragon did not die loudly. It folded its wings like a clerk closing a ledger, and the knight stood in the water with mud to his knees, breathing hard, and looked back up at the hut as if waiting for someone to ask where he had come from.

Nobody asked. The clerk stamped nothing that day. He wrote in the book: one rider, one lance, one beast, crossed by the reed road, no fee owed. Then, because the old woman says a border is only a line that someone has agreed to believe, he walked down to the water to see whether the knight had left anything behind. He had left one thing, a white stone the size of a seal, pressed flat into the mud, with a blossom pattern cut into its face.