Black and grey dragon tattoo design drawn on a plain white background, with a coiled serpentine body, lace-like wing detail and a horned head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled dragon tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon with a long, coiled serpentine body faces left, with a horned head, spiked crest and bat-like wings. The linework is bold and the wings and body are filled with fine, lace-like patterning and dark shading. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain white background, centred within the frame.

Dragon Serpent Horn Wing Scale Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has a rule about margins: nothing is drawn there until the psalm is finished, because a dragon that wanders in before the ink is dry will eat the words. I broke it in the hard winter when the ink froze in the pots, and I drew the serpent anyway, letting it coil down the left edge of folio nine like a thread pulled from a skein.

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I brewed the black from oak galls and gum, and cut my pen from a goose wing the cellarer swore was his. The wings I could not draw freehand. I pricked them with a bone awl, the way the sisters across the river taught me to lace their altar cloths, so each membrane was riddled with hundreds of tiny holes that let the candlelight through. When Anselm found the page at Lauds he said nothing. He carried it to the east window and turned it slowly, and the shadows of those holes slid across the bench like a net being drawn in.

The horns troubled him most. He said a dragon ought to face the way the sun goes, and mine faced west, toward the door, toward the road and the cold. I told him the beast was only listening for the bell that calls us to Compline, and he laughed for the first time that winter, a short bark like a fox. We argued it through two evenings with the page between us on the table.

On the third morning the dragon had moved. Its coils had loosened and the tail sat in the margin of the next psalm, curling over the letter Q as if it had always lived there. Nobody had touched the page. Anselm looked at it a long while, then dipped his pen, and left the dragon where it lay.