Digital illustration of a dragon coiled in a circle around a red and gold triskelion, set on a parchment-style background with faint script, with no body placement shown.

Coiled dragon around a red and gold triskelion

Colour · Flash

A dragon with a spined head and wings is wrapped around a three-armed spiral motif in red and dark ink. The linework is loose and sketchy with scratchy texture, and the spiral centres are shaded in red. The gold and ochre parchment background carries faint, illegible script-like marks that fill the composition.

Dragon Spiral Serpent Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the candle, for this is the one my grandmother told when the rain came in sideways over the hill. Three sisters lived at the bottom of Coldmere, and each had a spiral for a house: one wound inward, one wound out, and the third wound round on itself like a dog settling. They had a brother, a dragon with a crest like a broken comb, who slept coiled around the three houses so that nothing could come up the valley road unseen. Every harvest he asked for one thing only, a single tooth from the mill-wheel, which the millwright always gave him with a curse and a grin.

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The year the wheel stopped, the eldest sister went up to ask him why. She found him awake, his wings folded tight, his eyes gone the colour of rusted nails. He said the old words had worn off the stones of the mill, the ones that kept the valley from forgetting itself, and that he had been trying to read them back into the air with his tail. Every line he drew came out crooked. He could not finish the sentence and so he could not rest.

She brought him bread and ink and sat with him until the moon went over the ridge. Between them they copied the letters off the mill door, one by one, and the dragon's tail wrote them on the sky in red smoke. The mill turned at dawn. The sisters say the dragon still sleeps coiled round them, but if you lie in the long grass at midsummer you can see him shift, and every time he does, a little more of the old writing falls down like ash onto the parchment of the fields.