Black and grey realistic winged dragon tattoo across a woman's upper back, with wings spread and head turned to the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged dragon across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large winged dragon is tattooed across the upper back of a person photographed from behind, with the head and face out of frame. The dragon is rendered in fine, detailed black and grey shading, with soft gradients on the wings and body and sharp highlights on the scales and claws. The composition places the wings across the shoulder blades and the body and tail descending diagonally towards the lower left of the frame.

Realism Back Dragon Wing Claw Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got under the awning by eleven, so the canvas sagged over my trestles like a wet sail and every gust off the canal tipped a puddle onto the brass candlesticks. Nobody buys brass in weather like this. I told Dad so, and he told me the dragon would bring the customers, which was what he said when he'd had a whisky before opening.

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The dragon wasn't for sale. It sat on the bottom shelf behind the bread knives, a cast-iron thing about the length of my forearm, with its wings half folded and the black paint worn grey at every joint where somebody's hand had rubbed it for a hundred years. Dad had found it in a house clearance in Todmorden, wrapped in a Yorkshire Post from 1952, and he'd never priced it because he said he couldn't think what it was worth to a person who wasn't sure what it was.

A man in a green cagoule stopped at the stall just after noon. He didn't look at the candlesticks. He crouched, studied the dragon for a long time, and said his nan had one like it on the windowsill of a terrace near the mill, and that it had gone the night the chimney fell in the gale. "Took the wings first," he said. "Left the tail." Then he laughed at himself and walked off into the rain without buying anything.

When I packed up at four the sky had cleared to a thin green, and the cobbles were still shining. I set the dragon on the wet step to wrap it, and its shadow, thrown long by the lamp in the arcade, lay across the square with its wings spread wide over the shoulders of the stalls. I stood there with the newspaper in my hands until the shadow broke up in the puddles, and then I wrapped it in the paper and took it home with me.