Black ink flash design of a knotwork dragon coiled inside a circle, drawn on aged parchment with a faint star behind it.

Celtic knotwork dragon in a circle

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon or serpent with a knotwork-patterned body curls around the inside of a circle, with its head and claws reaching into the centre. The bold black linework has interlaced Celtic-style knots and spiral details on the body, and simple scale-like marks along the tail. The design sits on a sepia, parchment-textured background with a faint six-pointed star visible behind it.

Dragon Serpent Knotwork Celtic knot Circle Spiral Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's boy had been sent to keep the dragon out of the well, and at dusk on the seventh night he sat on the lip of it with a lantern and a sack of lime, listening to the water breathe. Everyone in Hollin Cross knew the beast was older than the church. It lay coiled under the hill with its tail in its own mouth, and the knots on its body were the roads the old families had walked for six hundred years, though nobody could say which road was which any more.

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The water rose. Then a head came up through it, slow as a barge, its jaw hung with weed, and the boy saw that the whorls along its neck were the same ones cut into the lych gate. He tipped the lime. The dragon blinked, one white eye like a pebble under glass, and spoke in the voice of the schoolmistress who had died the winter before. "You have been counting the stones again, Tom Pell."

He had. He had counted every stone in the wall between the well and the ford, because his father said a number kept a man honest, and the count had come to four hundred and nine, one short of the figure his father had carved on the lintel. "Four hundred and nine," the dragon said. "Go home and fetch the stone you hid under your bed."

He went. He found it there, wrapped in a handkerchief, a round flint with a hole worn through its middle. When he came back the lamp had guttered out and the well was still. He dropped the flint in. Somewhere under the hill something settled, and the knots on the lintel, which had been cut in a wandering circle nobody had ever finished, closed at last.