Large back tattoo of a purple and grey winged dragon with a serpent-like tail, with a zipper motif opening down the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged dragon back piece with zipper

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman's bare back shows a large tattoo of a winged dragon, with wings spread across the shoulder blades and a long serpent-like body curling down to the lower back. A zipper motif appears to part the skin along the spine, and a small purple-grey orb sits near the neck. The work uses soft grey and purple shading with fine detail in the scales and wing membranes, set against a dark background.

Realism Back Dragon Wing Serpent Spine Back piece

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mistress Agnes Pell had stitched the dragon's skin shut every winter for nine years, and every spring it split again along the spine when the thaw came up through the ruined keep. The villagers called the beast Old Seam. They left bread on the broken steps of Carrow Castle and did not go up after dark.

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The wings had been the trouble. A dragon with wings that size could lift a cow off the hill, so the lord before the last had nailed the gate shut and forgotten the creature, the way lords forget things they cannot sell. Agnes went up anyway with a bone needle and a hank of waxed sinew, and she sang to it, because her mother had told her a beast that is singing to will not bite.

On the ninth spring the seam came apart all at once, and out of the dark opening crawled a small grey thing like a moth made of ash, carrying a violet pearl in its mouth. It set the pearl on the stone between Agnes's boots and went back inside. The dragon lowered its head, and its eye, the colour of wet slate, was no longer angry.

Agnes took the pearl to the village and sold it for enough flour to see them through the hungry months. Then she climbed back up with the needle and found the seam had closed on its own, the dragon asleep with its tail wrapped round the old well. She never stitched it again.