Pencil sketch of a bearded wizard holding a staff, with a dragon curling over his head and wisps of smoke around the figure, drawn as a tattoo design with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bearded wizard and dragon design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil line drawing of an elderly bearded wizard with closed eyes, holding a staff topped with an orb. A dragon with spined wings and a long snout rises above his head, and smoke or flowing lines surround the figure. The work is in fine dark linework with light pencil shading and no colour, arranged as a tall, vertical composition.

Dragon Staff Beard Smoke Swirl Orb

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Ansgar had the copying room to himself the night the dragon came down off the page. I was sent to fetch him for vespers and found him standing with the lamp held high, not reading, only staring at the vellum where a grey old man had been drawn in the margin of the Psalter. The painter had given the wizard a staff with an orb at its crown and a beard that ran down past his belt in tangled ink. Above him, the dragon coiled through a fog of lines, its spined wings folded like a fan that had been shut too hard.

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"He is awake," Ansgar said, and I laughed, because the abbot did not allow jokes after compline.

But the smoke in the margin had moved. I saw it myself, curling thin as a thread from the dragon's nostrils and pooling around the old man's feet. Ansgar, who had spent forty years making the letters of God's word straight, turned the leaf and found the rest of the story written on the reverse, in a hand none of us knew. It told of a wizard who had once kept a dragon in a tower, and who had taught it to speak only the names of things it had burned. The last line was a request: to be let out of the margin before the Feast of the Circumcision, when the abbey copied its records and no one would look at the old pages.

We did not let him out. Ansgar took a knife and scraped the vellum, very gently, until the smoke lay flat, and then he prayed over the wound. In the morning the margin was blank, but the staff's orb had left a faint ring of soot on the page, and the dragon's eye, when I tilted the lamp, still followed me across the room.