A friend over on discord sent me a screenshot of TF2 he took back in 2009, and i took interest in one of the sprays he took a screenshot of. for the life of me i can't find the full version, i tried reverse searching it through various methods. here's a link

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/329788308907360256/330015704034181122/unknown.png

and here's one for the non-distorted edit attempt
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221253585948770304/330016255446876170/unknown.png

I can't source these as well, either on site or via reverse search tools. I'm willing to bet it's on FA, have you tried searching there?

searching FA is a nightmare. i don't know where to start

i tried to upscale it so it would be easier to examine

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221253585948770304/330092711484981249/02e1830b-4233-47d0-ba7b-5fbc98386cd6_waifu2x_art_noise1_scale_tta_1.png

Well, the image is anywhere from when FA started to (for simplicity's sake) 6 years ago, shaving off the excess of year 2010 in case FA searches by today's date instead of Dec 31. You know that there is a dragon, that they are gagged (already tried that search), against a wall, etc., so you can have several search terms to be specific or vague about. You can also try Google images, in case they can't get the image because of how low quality it is.

Latiodile said:
searching FA is a nightmare. i don't know where to start

just tried myself but part of the problem is FA doesn't enforce NAY tagging standards at all. and some artists use the tags as a description instead of the description space under a post. much as i despise the place for this reason, even paheal isn't that bad when it comes to tagging. :/

so there's always a chance that it is on FA but the artist went and used the tag section for the pics description. in which case, finding this pic on FA may be hopeless.

If it's on here, then it's missing some critical tags and can't be found (dragon, scalie, bondage, green_scales and/or black_penis combined with bondage, restrained, ball_gag, spreader_bar and/or rear_view).

If it's taken from somewhere like comic page, then reverse searching image itself is almost useless.

Like said above, FAs search function is pretty much useless for tons of reasons, lack of requirement for tagging being first one and cannot restrain upload time outside from month old. If I actually try to search from oldest to newest, it keeps throwing brand new images in the mix. Considering that's made to spray at 2009 and the sprays resolutions aren't that huge, possibility from it coming from somewhere like VCL instead is also really high.

One possibility is that if your friend haven't used any cleaner tools and is rocking same steam folder, the sprays you see are always saved in temp folder. Should at least give slightly better quality source for searching.

If we're looking through e621, one decent strategy could be to search for a tag that's obviously there (bondage) and then remove tags that obviously aren't there (bondage -white_background -sketch -mammal -nintendo, or something along those lines). It's not ideal, especially since we don't know if the post is on the site, but it's better than nothing.

thing is, i don't know if it's on here. i'm having doubts it's even on FA, due to how old it is

Latiodile said:
and here's one for the non-distorted edit attempt
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221253585948770304/330016255446876170/unknown.png

reminds me of winddragon's art