Painted illustration of a dark scaled dragon with raised wings wrapped around a maroon heart on a tan background, a design that could work as a tattoo.

Dragon coiled around a heart

Colour · Flash

A dark, scaled dragon with bat-like wings and a curled tail wraps itself around a large maroon heart, with its head resting near the lower right edge. The dragon is rendered with detailed scale texture, highlights on its claws and spines, and soft shading that gives it volume. It is set against a plain ochre, textured background, centred on the composition.

Dragon Heart Wing Claw 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

Every autumn the apples in Hollin Orchard came down sour, and every autumn old Marta Pell walked the rows with a basket on her hip and said nothing about it. Her son had gone over the hills to the salt towns the summer before, and the house was quiet enough to hear the wasps.

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One evening in late August a dragon came down out of the cloud over the top wall. It was no bigger than a sheepdog and as dark as wet slate, and its wings were torn at the edges like old sailcloth. It dropped into the lower field and lay there panting, and Marta, who had been raised on stories of worse things, took a bucket of windfalls out to it and set them down.

The dragon ate none of them. It looked at her, then at the red fruit, then back at her, and with one claw it scraped at the earth until a heart-shaped stone came up out of the clay, dark maroon and warm as a loaf. It pushed the stone toward her with its nose. Marta understood that she was meant to keep it, and she did not argue, because she had lost enough that year to know a gift when it was offered.

The dragon curled around the stone every night after that and slept with its tail wrapped twice about the base. The apples ripened sweet that autumn, the sweetest Marta had ever tasted. Her son came home at first frost, thin and sunburnt, and found his mother at the gate holding a red stone and laughing at a small dark shape asleep on the wall beside her.