Pencil drawing of a dragon with spread wings and a tail curling into a circle, shaded in brown tones on a pale yellow background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled dragon design in a circle

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a dragon drawn in a circular pose, with its head near the centre and its wings spread outwards to the edges. The linework is soft and the body is shaded with brown graphite, giving the design a mostly monochrome look. The composition sits on a plain yellowish background with the tail curling round the left side of the figure.

Dragon Wing Tail Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sniffer dog has already decided about the lorry before the paperwork reaches you, so you wave the driver into the bay and take the woman's passport yourself. Her name is Marta Oyelaran-Beck and her papers say translator, which never sounds finished under the booth light. She holds a folded sheet of drawing paper against her coat as though the wind off the water might take it.

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"My mother drew it," she says, when you ask what's in the envelope. You unfold it on the steel counter. A dragon sits inside a ring, its head low near the middle, its wings flung out until the tips touch the edge of the page. Someone has worked the body in brown graphite, soft and smudged, and the tail curls round the left side like a hand closing on a rope. There is no name on it, no stamp, nothing that says what it is for.

Regulations say you should ask what she is carrying across. Instead you ask how the river got its bend, because the crossing road loops the water three times and every officer here has a story about getting lost on it. She tells you the old people called it the coil, and that the dragon was meant to sleep in it. You stamp her through without comment and feel, absurdly, that you have been handed something you will have to keep.

At dawn you walk down to the third bend. Mist lies over the water in a ring exactly the shape of that tail, and for as long as you watch, nothing moves inside it.