Solid black tribal-style dragon design with swirling tail and flame-like spines on a white background, shown without a body placement.

Black tribal dragon design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black dragon design with a horned head facing left, a long spined body and a curling tail that ends in a spiral. The linework is bold and filled, with flame-like shapes along the back and wing, and the edges are textured with fine stitch-like lines. The design is shown in black on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Dragon Swirl Flame Horn Spine Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Hollin Bridge the week after the mill shut, six wagons and a canvas booth, and at the front of the line stood a painted dragon that the showman, Ezra Vell, would not let anyone touch. Its horned head faced the river and its body ran the length of the booth roof, black as a wet hearth, with flames licking along its back in shapes like torn wings. Nell Ashdown was nine and sold tickets from a biscuit tin, and she was the only one who noticed that the tail had uncurled a finger's width since the morning.

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By the second night it had reached the guy ropes. Ezra said it was the damp in the canvas, and he bought more pegs. The dragon did not care for pegs. On the third night the men heard a sound like a gate dragged over stones, and by morning the tail had looped twice around the lead wagon's axle, a spiral as tight as a fist. Ezra sold that wagon to a scrap dealer from Taunton before noon, paid the men in cash, and told Nell to keep the tin.

Mother Asha, who ran the coconut shies and had seen three fairs come and go, sat Nell on an upturned crate and said the dragon had only ever wanted to go back to the water. It had been carved from the wood of the old weir gate, she said, and a thing made from a river never forgets which way the river runs.

That autumn the field where the booth had stood kept a black ring in the grass that would not green. Nell walked past it on her way to school. Below the bridge, in the reeds, a heron stood with its head turned west, very still, as if it were waiting for something to come round the bend.