Black and grey drawing of a coiled, scaled dragon with fin-like crest and clawed feet, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Black and grey coiled dragon design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A coiled dragon fills the frame, with its body wrapping around a lower section that includes a clawed foot and a skull-like form. The linework is fine and detailed, with dense scale patterns, stippled shading and feathered strokes along the fins and mane. The image is entirely black ink and grey tones on a plain white background.

Japanese Dragon Scale Claw Fin Skull

Find an artist for this

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

The snow had already taken the lower road when Tomas and I reached the Gallows Cut, and the mules would go no further without rest. We made camp in the lee of a split boulder, and I was mending a harness by lamplight when the scales began to sound against the rock above us, a dry rattle like someone shaking a bag of dice.

Keep reading

My grandmother had told me the old tale of the Coil, the serpent that slept under the pass and woke whenever a traveller lied about the weight of his load. She had made me swear to speak plainly in the high places. So when the coils came down the cliff face, grey as slate and ridged along the spine with fins like torn sails, I did not lie. I said we carried salt, six sacks of it, that Tomas had a bad knee and a worse temper, and that I was the only one who could read the weather in the clouds.

The beast stopped. Its head came down level with the lantern, and there was a skull set in the crook of its forelimb, fused to the bone, picked clean and polished by wind, with one clawed foot curled around it as if guarding a pot. It looked at me for a long time. Then it asked, in a voice like a bellows, what I was hiding in the third sack.

Nothing, I said, which was the truth. The third sack held my mother's ashes, and she had never liked the cold.

The Coil lowered its great head, breathed a long grey fog over the mules, and went back up the rock. In the morning the pass was clear and the sacks were light by one. I still count them by the weight of what I did not say.