Black blackwork-style dragon design with patterned wings that break apart into flying crows, drawn on a tan parchment background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon dissolving into flying crows

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A dragon in profile, with a coiled tail and wings that fade into a flock of crows flying away from the upper right. The body and wings use bold solid black shapes with fine pale linework that outlines scales and wing membranes. The design is shown in black ink on a plain tan, parchment-like background, with no colour.

Blackwork Dragon Crow Bird Wing Flight Tail Scale

Find an artist for this

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 dragon had lived forty winters in the cave under Carrow Hill, and every one of them the old men of Tallow Fen had brought it a goat at midsummer so it would not come down to the barley. That was the bargain, and nobody remembered who had made it. When the fair came through in the year the bridge washed out, the showman's girl, Mab Hollis, walked up the hill alone with a cracked pot of honey and a question.

Keep reading

The dragon was smaller than the stories said, and tired, its pale scale-lines dulled like old lead. It asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted to know why it stayed. It thought about this for a long while, its tail curled round the hearth stones, and then it said that dragons do not fly when they are afraid of being seen, and it had been afraid of being seen for a very long time.

Mab went back down with the honey still in her apron. The next morning the men found the cave empty, and over the fen a flock of crows was rising and wheeling, the great wings of the beast still in the shape of them, scattering north over the river toward the fair. They say the showman never once charged for the crows' stall again. They say, too, that on still evenings at Tallow Fen you can hear the wingbeats in the reeds, and that if you throw bread at the water, the birds come down out of the sky to take it, one after another, as though they had been waiting for someone to ask.