Black and grey pencil drawing of a dragon and a phoenix facing each other in a heart-like curve, shaded in fine detail, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and phoenix facing design

Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of a dragon and a phoenix facing one another, with their wings and tails curling together to form a rounded, heart-like outline. The dragon has a scaled body and a ridged wing on the left, while the phoenix has feathered plumes and a long tail that sweeps down and ends in a fine, forked flourish. Shading is built up with soft greys and dark accents on a plain white background.

Dragon Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Scale 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

Mind the lamp, lad, and sit where the coal dust won't get in your tea. My grandmother told me this one on the night the Ffynnon pit flooded, and she told it with her hands, the way you'd tell a thing that had happened to you.

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There was a dragon that lived under the hill at Cwm Dulas, all scale and cold patience, and it had been down there so long it forgot the sky. Up top, a phoenix kept the widows' bread-oven burning, because the phoenix had nothing to do with the dark and liked it that way. Every shift-change the dragon would climb the shaft to the very mouth of the working, just to hear the bird's feathers rustle against the winding gear. Neither one would say a word to the other. Words were for men with lamps, and they had enough of those.

Then the roof gave way on the lower seam, and the dragon was trapped with six men behind a fall of rock. The phoenix didn't wait for the rescue crew. She went down the shaft on her own wind, her long tail sweeping the rungs clean, and she sat herself in the gap until the dragon's ridged wing was pressed against her breast, and the two of them made a warm place in the stone, the way a hen keeps her chicks. The men came out breathing, one at a time, and not one of them ever saw the pair of them go.

So when you see a dragon and a phoenix curling tail to tail on the wall of a chapel, you know it isn't a romance, whatever the wives say. It's a kind of shelter, that's all. Now pass me that kettle, and mind the lamp.