Black tribal-style dragon design coiled in a circle on a white background, drawn as a flash with no body placement shown.

Coiled tribal dragon design

Black and grey · Flash

A black tribal-style dragon is coiled in a loose circle, with its head and open jaw at the upper right and spiked, flame-like shapes running along the outer edge. The design uses bold solid black fills for the spikes and thin tapering strokes for the body and interior details. It is a flat black-on-white drawing with no shading or colour.

Dragon Spike Flame Serpent Tribal

Find an artist for this

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

Now you'll want to hear about the Skerry Dragon, and you'll want to keep your voice down while I tell it, because the sea likes to listen. My grandfather kept the light at Corran Head the winter the herring failed. Every night he climbed the one hundred and twelve steps, wound the clockwork, and trimmed the wick, and every night he looked down at the black rock below the cliff, where something lay coiled like a rope left out to dry.

Keep reading

It had a head like a rearing horse, he said, with its jaw hung open, and along its back ran spines that flared upward in black flame, so that when the moon came through the cloud the whole ring of it looked on fire and cold at once. The fishermen called it the Ring. They rowed wide of it. Nobody had seen it move, but the gulls never sat on those rocks, and the lamp oil went down faster on the nights the wind came off the water.

The turn came in March. A boy from the mainland, Tomas Reid, had rowed out after a lost dinghy and got himself stranded on the skerry as the tide came in. My grandfather saw his lantern bobbing among the spines. He had no boat that could reach him, so he did the only thing a keeper knows. He turned the lamp down to a single slow pulse, the old count of the sea, one long and two short, and he kept it going until dawn. Some say the dragon lifted its head to that rhythm. My grandfather swore only that when the boy was lifted off at first light, the spines had gone dark and still, and the jaw had closed.