Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black tribal-style dragon design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical dragon drawn in solid black with a spiked back, clawed feet, a horned head and a long coiling body with scale detail. The linework is bold and graphic, with the black areas filling the shapes and white inlines separating the form. The image is monochrome on a plain white background with the design centred and no body part visible.

Blackwork Dragon Serpent Claw Scale Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that bench, the 9.15 is late and so am I, which is the proper order of things at Halstow Junction. You'll have heard the dragon story from the lads in the buffet, but they tell it wrong. It wasn't a beast that came up out of the marsh. It was already coiled under the old iron bridge when the first navvies arrived with their picks, and it lay there with its horned head resting on the cutting wall, watching the men lay track.

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The navvies were frightened, so they fed it coal, a shovel of it each night tipped down the embankment. The dragon liked the taste of smoke. It grew sleek and black, its spines rising like the teeth of a saw, and in return it kept the rain off the signal box and the wind off the points. Ada Preece, who worked the lever frame for forty-one years, swore she once saw it lift a derailed wagon back onto the rails with one clawed foot, then lower it gently, the way a mother sets down a sleeping child.

Then they electrified the line. Overhead wires went up, the steam stopped, and the dragon got no coal. On the last night before the switchover, Ada climbed down to the cutting with a lamp and found the creature wrapped tight around itself, its scales dulling to grey. 'You've been good to us,' she told it, and it lifted one black eye toward the light.

Next morning the dragon was gone. In its place, along the cutting wall, lay a long trail of black scales, each one as big as a platter and smelling faintly of cinders. Ada kept one in her coat pocket until the day she died. Some say it still hums when the 9.15 passes, and if you press your palm to it you can feel the heat of a fire that went out long ago.