Solid black dragon design with white linework and flowing spiked fins, shown on a white background as a tattoo flash drawing.

Black tribal-style dragon design

Black and grey · Flash

A coiled dragon in profile faces left, with a long curling body, spiked crest, clawed forelimbs and a large sweeping fin along its back. The design is built from bold black shapes cut through with thin white lines that define the scales, fins and facial features. It is shown in solid black and white on a plain white background with the whole figure centred.

Dragon Fin Claw Crest Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Carrow House had been stuck between the ninth and tenth floors since Tuesday, and Mrs Okafor on fourteen had stopped pretending she didn't mind. I went up the service ladder with a torch in my teeth and a flask of tea I wasn't going to drink, because the cable access hatch was the only place in the block where a man could see the whole shaft at once.

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Someone had painted the dragon inside the shaft years ago, before the council wrapped the outside in cladding. It started in the basement and coiled up past every landing, its crest flaring like a row of struck matches, its back fin running the full height of the building. Nobody admitted to it. Kids, the old residents said, or a painter who lived on eleven and drank in the Crown. Where the black had flaked, the grey plaster showed through in thin pale lines, so the creature looked half drawn and half remembered.

The fault was a snapped traction cable, and I found the broken end wound round the dragon's foreclaw where the paint was thickest. To splice it I'd have to cut the claw away. I sat on the hatch with the torch fixed on that claw for a long time, wondering who would put something so careful in a place nobody looked, and what they had expected it to hold. In the end I spliced the cable around the claw, not through it, and left the paint alone.

When the doors finally opened on ten, Mrs Okafor was waiting with her shopping and a face that said she'd heard the whole business through the walls. 'Did you see the dragon?' she asked. I said I had. She nodded as if that settled a bill between us. Above the lift, through the grille, the tail was still coiling on toward the roof, and the fin caught the landing light as though it had been waiting for someone to look up.