Pencil sketch of a dragon coiling around a wolf that sits below it, drawn in soft shaded linework as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and wolf entwined pencil design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing shows a long, serpentine dragon whose head faces a wolf seated at lower right, with their muzzles nearly touching. The fur, scales and flowing tail are drawn with fine, feathered linework and soft graded shading on a pale background. The composition loops the dragon's body around the wolf and across the page, forming a balanced, circular outline.

Dragon Wolf Tail Fur Scale

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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

The lamp has gone dark twice this week, and the keeper's boy has taken the fever, so it falls to you to climb the 147 steps with the paraffin can and the cloth. Halfway up, the grey wolf from the cottage below trots past you, unasked, and sits at the top of the stair as if it has been hired.

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Out past the skerries, the sea is doing something it does not do in March. Water stands up in a long curling shape, scaled like wet slate, and the wind carries a sound like a cart rolling over a bridge. The old fishermen call it the Sea Drake and say it wants the light put out so the ships will strike the rocks and it can have the wreckage. You have never believed them, but the wolf growls low at the glass, and when you look down, the dragon's head lifts out of the swell and turns slowly to face the wolf, its jaw nearly touching the wolf's nose.

They hold there. Neither bites. The dragon's tail loops back round the foundations like a rope round a bollard, and the wolf's breath fogs the glass in a slow circle. You light the wick with your back to the wind and the flame catches, and the beam swings out across the water and finds the dragon's flank, and the scales go gold for one sweep before it turns away.

By dawn the sea is flat. The dragon has coiled itself back under the rock, and the wolf is sitting in the doorway, pleased with itself, its tail wrapped round its paws. Nobody in the village believes you. The paraffin can is empty, and there are long wet marks on the stair where something heavy has been dragged up to look at the light.