Black ink line drawing of a winged dragon and a phoenix with flame-like tail swirls, shown as two tattoo designs on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and phoenix tattoo designs

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two separate tattoo designs on a white background. On the left, a winged dragon curls downward into a coiled tail, with shaded scales and detailed wing membranes. On the right, a phoenix with spread wings has a stylised, flowing tail made of flame-like tendrils, drawn with fine linework and dense hatching.

Dragon Phoenix Wing Flame Bird 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

You were told to keep the bonfire small, so you rake the wet leaves into a heap no higher than your knee and wait for the smoke to lie down among the box hedges. Beyond the orchard wall the old glasshouse ticks as the last light leaves its panes. Nobody has burned anything in this corner since the summer Mr Tolley went off to sea and left his tools hanging on their nails.

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The dragon lives on the sundial plinth, or so the village children swear. Its tail is a bronze coil that Mrs Pryce rubs with vinegar every Saturday, and its wings are the shadow the pergola throws across the lawn at four o'clock. You have never seen it move. Last night, though, there was grey ash on the stone where its claws should be, and a feather as long as your forearm lying wet in the grass by the gate.

You carry the feather to the bonfire and lay it across the leaves, half expecting it to smoulder. It doesn't. The quill darkens, curls like a fern uncurling, and then the tip catches with no flame at all, only a pale glow that climbs the stalks of the rhubarb. The heap in the corner goes up in one soft roar. You step back until your heels touch the wall and watch the sparks rise in long looping strands, bending the way the dragon's tail bends, toward the rooftops of the sleeping town.

By morning the sundial is bare and the hedge is scorched in a neat ring. Mrs Pryce comes out with her bucket, finds the leaves gone to fine white ash, and in the centre of it a single egg-shaped stone, still warm, with a spiral pressed into it like a tail. She picks it up, looks at the sky, and says nothing at all.