Black line drawing of a curling dragon with swept wings and a spiked tail on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curling dragon line design

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a dragon curled into a spiral, with its head facing down and its wings and spiked tail sweeping around the outside. The linework is bold and tapered, with solid black areas for the wing and body shapes and no shading. The design is shown in black on a plain white background with no colour.

Dragon Wing Spiral Tail

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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

Now sit close, because the wind's getting into the chapel roof again and I'll not shout over it. Our Tom's grandfather swore the dragon came over the hill above Carrick Bottom the winter the reservoir froze, and it didn't come to burn anything. It came looking for a bell.

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It had lost its own hoard somewhere in the north, the old men said, and the only thing it still wanted was a sound it remembered from before the mines: a bell that rang true across water. So it wound itself round the chapel spire the way a cat curls on a warm step, head tucked low, wings folded out like a pair of black umbrellas, and it waited. Nobody in the village could sleep for the creak of its tail against the slates.

Mrs Hollis, who kept the post office and had no patience for anything, climbed up with a tuning fork and a tin of goose grease. She sang the note her husband had lost in the pit, low and steady, and the dragon lifted its head. Its eyes were like two coals in a grate somebody had forgotten to bank. It listened until the hymn was finished, then it uncurled, slow as a sail coming down, and went off over the hill towards the sea.

The bell never rang again that winter, the chapel having no bell left to ring. But every March after, a single feather of black ash turned up on the step of the post office, and Mrs Hollis would pick it up, put it in her apron, and say nothing at all. That is all there is, and it's cold enough now for you to be off home.