Black and grey tribal dragon tattoo with spread wings covering the upper and middle back, photographed against a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragon with spread wings across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person with dark hair faces away from the camera, showing a large tribal dragon with outstretched wings across the back, its body running down the centre of the spine. The design uses solid black ink with bold, sharp wing shapes and intricate interlaced patterning along the body. The photograph is in greyscale and the tattoo fills the frame against a dark brick wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Priya,

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I nearly didn't open the reunion envelope. The cream card still smells of the Hallam Road sports hall, or my memory of it does, which comes to the same thing. Mr Dacre's dragon is still there, you know. They never sanded it off the boiler room door. Last week I went back for the old lost property box and found it, black paint gone grey at the edges, wings thrown wide across the corridor wall where we used to hide our cigarettes behind the fire extinguisher.

Remember how he told us it was a Welsh dragon, then admitted he'd copied it from a Christmas cracker? The interlacing down its body was meant to be a river, he said, and the spine the current. We spent a whole Tuesday tracing the knots with our fingers until the paint came off on our skin and Mrs Okafor sent us to the nurse.

So I'm not coming on the twelfth. I'd rather stand in that corridor with the lights off and count the wing bones on the wall. But I've enclosed the sheet you asked for, with my name ticked and a little drawing in the margin of the dragon, badly done, its tail looping off the edge of the page.

Will you bring the box to the hall? The one with the carved pencil and the rusted compass. Leave it by the door. Somebody should take it home.

Love, Ruth

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