The Living Tattoo
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Arthur Penhaligon was a man of beige existence. He drove a beige sedan, lived in a beige apartment complex, and worked as a actuary assessing risk. His life was a flat line of safety and predictability. Perhaps that was why, on his thirty-fifth birthday, amidst a mid-life crisis that arrived five years early, he decided to do something dangerous.
He decided to get a tattoo.
He didn’t go to a high-end studio with waiting lists and Instagram portfolios. He found “The Obsidian Needle” down a rain-slicked alley in the Lower District. The sign was flickering neon, buzzing like a trapped insect. Inside, the air smelled of copper, rubbing alcohol, and something earthy, like old soil.
The artist was a man named Silas—a skeletal figure with eyes that seemed to have seen empires rise and fall. He didn’t ask Arthur what he wanted. He just looked at Arthur’s pale, undefined bicep and nodded.
“A dragon,” Silas rasped. “To wake the fire that isn’t there.”
Arthur, intimidated and strangely compelled, agreed.
The Incision
The pain was unlike anything Arthur had expected. It wasn’t the stinging scratch of a needle; it felt like a branding iron. He watched, mesmerizing, as Silas worked without a stencil. The ink was darker than black—it seemed to absorb the light in the room.
The dragon took shape. It wasn’t a cartoonish creature. It was an ancient, serpentine beast with scales that looked like chipped flint and eyes that held a microscopic, malicious glint of red. It coiled around his upper right arm, its claws digging into his deltoid, its mouth open in a silent roar.
“It is finished,” Silas said, wiping the blood away. “Do not cover it. It needs to breathe.”
Arthur paid in cash—Silas didn’t take cards—and stumbled out into the rain, his arm throbbing with a heat that radiated through his entire body.
The First Shift
The first night, Arthur slept fitfully. He had fever dreams of flying over burning cities, the wind rushing past his ears, the smell of smoke filling his lungs.
When he woke up, his sheets were soaked in sweat. He groaned, reaching for the water glass, and winced as the soreness in his arm flared up. He walked to the bathroom mirror to inspect his rebellion against mediocrity.
He froze.
The dragon was there, on his right arm. But it wasn’t how he remembered it.
Yesterday, the dragon’s head had been facing his shoulder, its tail wrapped around his elbow. Today, the dragon’s head was resting on his forearm, near his wrist. Its body was uncoiled, stretching down the length of his bicep in a straight line.
“No,” Arthur whispered, rubbing his eyes. “I’m just tired. I’m remembering it wrong.”
He pulled out his phone and found the selfie he had taken immediately after the session. He compared the photo to the mirror.
In the photo: Dragon coiled. Head up. In the mirror: Dragon straight. Head down.
A cold shiver walked down his spine. It wasn’t just a different pose; the ink looked… rested.
The Denial
Arthur called in sick. He spent the morning staring at his arm. He took a Sharpie marker and drew tiny outline marks around the dragon’s claws and snout.
“Stay,” he commanded the ink.
He sat on his couch, watching movies, glancing at his arm every five minutes. Nothing happened. The dragon remained static, a masterpiece of art. By 4:00 PM, Arthur felt foolish. It must have been the swelling, he reasoned. Swelling distorts skin. That’s all it was.
Exhausted by his own paranoia, he took a nap on the sofa.
He woke up to a sensation of tickling. Like a spider walking across his skin.
He snapped his eyes open and looked at his arm.
The dragon was gone.
Arthur screamed, scrambling off the couch. He tore his shirt off, spinning in front of the hallway mirror.
The dragon was on his back. It had migrated over his shoulder blade and was now curled comfortably around his spine, its head resting near the nape of his neck.
The Visit to the Void
Panic, cold and sharp, took hold. Arthur grabbed his keys and ran to his car. He drove recklessly through the city, ignoring red lights, speeding back to the Lower District. He needed answers. He needed Silas to laser this thing off, cut it out, do something.
He skidded to a halt at the entrance of the alley. He ran down the wet cobblestones, looking for the flickering neon sign.
It wasn’t there.
Where “The Obsidian Needle” had been, there was only a solid brick wall. The bricks were old, covered in graffiti that had been there for years. There was no door. No window. No space for a shop to have ever existed.
Arthur pounded on the bricks until his knuckles bled. “Silas! Open up! What did you do to me?”
A homeless man pushing a cart stopped and watched him. “Ain’t been nothing there for twenty years, buddy. Used to be a butcher shop. Burned down.”
Arthur slid down the wall, clutching his shoulder. The dragon on his back felt warm. Pulsing.
The Physical Toll
Days turned into a week. Arthur stopped going to work. He stopped eating. The Living Tattoo was a parasite.
It moved every time he slept. If he took a twenty-minute power nap, he would wake up to find the dragon on his chest. If he slept for eight hours, the dragon would be wrapped around his leg.
But it wasn’t just moving. It was changing.
The dragon was getting bigger. It was feeding.
Arthur noticed it first when he looked in the mirror and saw the dragon’s claws looked sharper, more defined. The scales were thicker. And he felt… drained. Every morning he woke up weaker, lighter, as if the ink was drinking his vitality to fuel its locomotion.
He tried to stay awake. He drank espresso until his heart fluttered like a trapped moth. He paced his apartment for forty-eight hours straight.
But the body demands payment. On the third day of no sleep, Arthur collapsed on the kitchen floor.
The Restriction
He woke up gasping for air.
His throat felt tight. Constricted.
He crawled to the mirror, his vision swimming.
The dragon was wrapped around his neck. Its tail started at his collarbone, coiled twice around his throat, and the head… the head was right under his jaw. The red eyes of the ink dragon were staring directly into Arthur’s real eyes in the reflection.
It was choking him. Not enough to kill, but enough to assert dominance.
Arthur clawed at his neck, his fingernails digging into his skin. He scratched until he bled, trying to peel the ink off. But the dragon was part of the dermis. It was under the skin, woven into the fiber of his being.
“What do you want?” Arthur wheezed at his reflection.
For a second, the ink shimmered. The dragon’s mouth, frozen in a roar, seemed to curl into a smirk.
The Hostile Takeover
Arthur realized he couldn’t fight it physically. He went to the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife. If he couldn’t scrub it off, he would cut it out.
He raised the knife to his throat.
Suddenly, his arm jerked. His right arm. The arm that was supposed to be holding the knife.
He didn’t tell it to move. It moved on its own.
His hand went rigid, the muscles locking up. The knife clattered to the floor.
Arthur stared at his hand in horror. A tendril of black ink had snaked down from his neck, across his shoulder, and into the nerves of his arm. The dragon wasn’t just on his skin anymore. It was tapping into his nervous system.
It was piloting him.
The Fever Dream
That night, Arthur didn’t try to stay awake. He surrendered to the darkness, hoping he wouldn’t wake up.
He found himself in a dreamscape. He was standing in a vast cavern made of obsidian. In the center of the cavern lay the dragon—massive, living, breathing smoke and fire.
“Arthur,” the dragon spoke. Its voice sounded like grinding stones.
“You are killing me,” Arthur yelled, his voice echoing in the void.
“I am saving you,” the dragon rumbled, slithering closer. Its heat was unbearable. “You were a husk. A shell of gray nothingness. I have brought you fire.”
“I don’t want it! I want my life back!”
“You want safety,” the dragon hissed. “But you bought chaos. You paid in blood. We are bound now. I need your fear. I need your adrenaline. You starve me with your boredom.”
The dragon loomed over him. “Feed me experiences, Arthur. Feed me life. Or I will consume yours entirely.”
The Symbiosis
Arthur woke up. The dragon was off his neck. It was resting on his chest, right over his heart. It felt heavy, like a protective plate of armor.
He understood the bargain. The dragon was a biological entity made of magic and ink, and it required metabolic energy derived from intensity. It was starving on his diet of spreadsheets and sitcoms.
Arthur stood up. He felt different. The weakness was gone, replaced by a buzzing, electric energy.
He went to his closet. He put on his beige work clothes. Then he ripped them off. He put on jeans and a leather jacket he hadn’t worn in a decade.
He walked out of his apartment. He went to the roof of the building. He stood on the ledge, looking down at the traffic twenty stories below.
His heart hammered—thud, thud, thud. Pure adrenaline.
On his chest, he felt the dragon shift. It felt… purring. The ink warmed his skin, sending a rush of endorphins into his blood that felt better than any drug.
The New Skin
Six months later.
Arthur Penhaligon sat in a dive bar in Bangkok. He had a scar on his cheek from a knife fight in Macau and a bag of money under the table from a high-stakes race he had just won.
He wore a tank top. His skin was tanned and weathered.
A tourist at the next table leaned over. “Hey, man. That is a sick tattoo.”
Arthur looked down at his left arm. The dragon was currently coiled there, its scales shimmering with a faint, iridescent sheen. It looked predatory, majestic, and alive.
“Thanks,” Arthur smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was a smile that promised trouble.
“Where did you get it?” the tourist asked.
“A place that doesn’t exist,” Arthur replied.
He took a shot of whiskey. He felt the dragon move, sliding slowly from his bicep to his forearm, eager to be seen, eager for the next thrill.
Arthur wasn’t the owner of the tattoo. He was the vessel. And for the first time in his life, he wasn’t boring. He was the canvas for a monster, and they had a lot of painting left to do.
