Flash sheet of stylised dragon head designs in black, red, purple, brown, blue, green and teal, with a large black spiral dragon at the centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon head designs around a spiral dragon

Mixed · Flash

A set of seven dragon head designs in simple solid silhouette form, each in a different flat colour, arranged in a ring around a larger black spiral dragon. The linework is bold and graphic with no shading, and the heads show varied features such as open jaws, horns and frills. The white background and even spacing make it read like a clip art or flash sheet rather than a photograph.

Dragon Spiral Silhouette Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker's daughter had been counting the dragons for a week before anyone thought to ask her why. Seven heads, Mrs Penhallow said, were a sign of a parish that had got above itself, and the vicar agreed, and so did the man from the council who came down the cobbles with a clipboard and a face like wet slate. But Maud only wanted to know which head had come first. Nobody could tell her. The black one in the middle had been painted on the harbour wall the summer the herring failed, and the others had crept round it one at a time, purple, then red, then brown as a bread crust, until they formed a ring as neat as a dial.

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She took the ring apart on her father's bench, one wheel at a time, and found that each dragon turned on the same spindle as the spiral at the centre. The coil was not a tail at all. It was a mainspring, wound tight, and every head was a gear waiting for its tooth to catch. When she set the brass hands to midnight the harbour bell rang once, and the blue head with the frilled crest lifted from the wall and sniffed the sea.

The creature did not roar. It simply swam out past the breakwater and began to unwind the tide, slowly, so that the boats settled on the mud in their proper order and the gulls stopped quarrelling. By dawn the water had gone back where it belonged and the wall was bare grey stone.

Maud kept the mainspring in a tobacco tin under the bench. Some mornings she hears it ticking, and on those days the fishermen's wives say she has been up to something again.