Black and grey shaded dragon tattoo with spread wings and a long spiked tail, on the upper arm.

Winged dragon on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey dragon with spread wings, a spiked back and a long curling tail is tattooed on the outer upper arm. The wings and body use layered shading and fine hatched detail to suggest scales and membrane, and the claws are drawn with defined highlights. The dragon is centred on the arm against a pale skin tone, with a dark garment and a blurred background around it.

Upper arm Dragon Wing Tail Claw Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook was the first to see it lift its head off the foremast yard, a long black shape with its wings half open against a sky the colour of wet slate. We had been becalmed nine days off the Horn, the water flat as pewter and the biscuit gone soft with damp, so when the thing shifted its weight we all took it for a trick of the glare until the topsail creaked under its claws.

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It was not handsome in the way the figurehead on the Margaret was handsome. Its wings had the look of old harness leather, cracked along the struts and stretched thin where the light came through. Its back was ridged with spines, each one as long as a marlinspike, and its tail hung down the shrouds and curled round the belaying pin like a rope left out to dry. Tobias, the ship's boy, sat under the capstan counting the scales and gave up at four hundred.

Captain Hale went below and came back with the logbook, the one with the brass corners. He opened it to the last written page, where the mate had put down the date we lost the sun, and held it up to the creature the way a man might show a bill to a tax collector. The dragon studied the page for a long moment. Then it leaned in and pressed one hooked claw into the paper, leaving a neat black print beside the word becalmed.

The wind came up before the watch changed, filling the sails with a sound like a drawn breath. When Tobias looked over the side the creature was gone, and the only shadow on the water was the ship's own. The print was still there in the morning, dry and perfect, and Hale never wrote another line about the weather.