Solid black flash design of a stylised dragon-like creature with a curling spiral tail and sweeping wing-like spikes, on a white background.

Black silhouette dragon with spiral tail

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a stylised dragon or lizard-like creature, shown in profile with a head, a clawed foreleg and a long, sharply tapering body. The sweeping spiked shapes and a tight spiral tail give it a bold, graphic outline. The image is flat black on white with no shading or added colour, so it reads as a stencil-ready design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fourth step, it has been wanting to break since my grandfather's day. Sit close to the brazier, the wind comes under the cloister door like a thief looking for the candles. Now. You will want to know why the dragon came to Saint Wenna's in the hungry spring, and I will tell it, but you must not interrupt, because I have told it wrong three times already and the brothers have their ways of correcting an old man.

Keep reading

It came down off the scree at dusk, its body thin as a heron's leg and its foreleg raised, talons spread like the iron spikes on the water gate. It did not breathe fire. It asked for the brother who kept the bell. So Brother Osric went up the tower stair with his lamp shaking in his hand, and he found the creature coiled on the leads, its tail wound tight into a spiral like the one on the abbot's seal.

The dragon said the abbey owed it a debt. Forty winters before, a monk had borrowed a name from the creature to ward off a sickness in the fens, and never given it back. Osric must read the ledger aloud, every name written in the scriptorium, and the dragon would take back the ones it was owed and leave the rest in peace. So he read. He read through the night with the wind pulling at the pages, and at each name the spines along the creature's back lifted a little and settled again.

When the bell for matins rang, the dragon uncurled, slid off the roof like spilt ink, and went over the fens without a sound. Osric never told anyone which names it took. But the next morning the cloister flags bore a black spiral scorched where the creature had lain. Put your thumb in it, if you go and look. Some say it is still warm. Some say that is only the brothers' cooking.

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