Black line drawing of a dragon coiled in a circle, with raised wings and a hexagonal scaled body, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled dragon with raised wings

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon with a long, scaled body curls into a circle, with its head at the lower left and its wings raised along the upper right. The outlines are black on a white background, with the scales drawn as hexagonal cells and the wing membranes divided by thin lines. The image is a plain, uncoloured design with no shading and a centred composition.

Dragon Wing Scale Coil Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth, the rain has been coming sideways across the square since Tuesday, so the stall is shut and I am writing this at the kitchen table with my boots steaming by the range. You will laugh, but I have finally got the measure of Mr Colley's well-head. The stone is the old grey kind that drinks water, and the carving on the lip is a dragon coiled round in a ring, its tail tucked into its own jaws the way the baker's boy draws it on the cake boards. Every scale is a little six-sided cell, like the honeycomb Aunt Lil kept under her bell jar, and where the wings lift up to the north they have worn so thin you can see daylight through the ribs.

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Those ribs are what kept me up. Colley swore nobody had ever found the join where the head meets the coil, but when I wiped the moss away with a brush and a bucket of vinegar, there it was: a hairline gap, no wider than a knitting needle, sitting just behind the jaw. I put my thumb to it and the stone was cold the way iron is cold, not stone at all. Someone cut that gap on purpose so a thing could slip through.

I did not tell Colley. I left the gap alone, went home, and this morning I found a folded paper pushed through my own letterbox, unsigned, with four words in a looping hand: the dragon keeps its place. I have decided that is an instruction and not a threat. So I am pulling my boots on again now, and I am taking the old brass key from the drawer, the one that opens nothing we own.