Black and white photo of two people holding hands, both with tattooed arms, showing a dragon and clouds sleeve on the right arm and a dagger design on the left forearm.

Tattooed sleeves holding hands

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people hold hands in a black and white photograph, and both have arms covered in tattoos. The right arm carries a sleeve with a dragon, clouds and wave-like shapes in bold black linework and shading. The left arm shows traditional-style designs including a dagger and small script, with the shading kept mostly in greys.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Hollin Bottom every third spring, when the river was low enough to ford at the mill. Old Ansel Crake ran the knife stall there, and he had a daughter called Wren who could catch a thrown blade by its handle without looking up from her mending.

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One wet spring a dragon came down out of the cloud that sat on the moor. It was grey as wet slate and as long as the mill race, and it coiled itself on the hill above the fairground to watch the lamps being lit. Nobody screamed. Ansel said dragons were only weather that had grown bored of rain, and he went on sharpening. But the dragon wanted something first: it asked to see the knife act done properly, once, by someone who would not flinch.

Wren stepped out onto the trampled grass. Ansel threw, she caught, and the dragon breathed out a sheet of mist that wrapped the whole field in white. When it thinned, the dragon had slid back up into the cloud, and the blade in Wren's hand had a fine silver wave scored along its spine where the cold had touched it.

Every spring after, when the fair came back to Hollin Bottom, a grey shape lay along the top of the cloud, and the children swore they could see a long tail curled loosely round the knife-thrower's daughter's wrist. Ansel never said whether it was true. He kept the knife with the wave on it and sold no other blade in the county.

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