Black tribal dragon tattoo with spiky wings and a curled tail across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Tribal dragon on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black tribal-style dragon with a head facing left, spiked wings and a curling tail covers the upper back over the shoulder blade. The bold, solid black linework has tapered spikes and no shading, and the photograph shows only skin and the tattoo against a plain background.

Blackwork Back Dragon Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river had been low for three summers when the cattle started coming back to the ford with their flanks scored, and my master, Tarnu, swore the drought-serpent was waking under the reeds. He was a man who trusted only what he could hammer. So he gave me the black iron, the bog ore we had smelted with pine charcoal until it went the colour of wet slate, and told me to make a boss for the new shield, something to frighten a serpent off.

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I did not draw the beast first. I cut the spikes. Each one I sheared from the sheet with a cold chisel, tapered to a needle and bent back so the firelight would slide off it, and I laid them on the anvil like the fins of a fish that had learned to fly. The head came last, turned to the left as though it had heard something behind it in the reeds. Its tail I curled tight around the rim so it seemed to be biting its own shadow. Tarnu walked the length of the forge twice and said nothing, which from him was praise.

The shield went to the ford with the young men, and the cattle went back to grazing. Tarnu claimed the iron had done it. The rains had come by then, and I knew which of them had done the work. Still, every night the shield hung on the wall of our house, its tail-shadow crept a finger's width nearer the door. My wife said I had made the tail too long. I kept meaning to shorten it.

I never did. On the last night before the river rose, I found the shield propped against the threshold with its spikes all turned toward the water, and beyond the ford the reeds lay flattened in a long curl, as if something had been lying there and was now thinking about going home.