Dragon head in profile, pencil drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon head seen in profile, facing right, with two long swept-back horns, a row of spiked frills along the back of the neck and an open mouth showing sharp teeth and fangs. The linework is detailed, with pencil shading on the horns, brow and jaw and fine hatched scales along the neck. The drawing is in greyscale on a plain white background, with the head filling most of the frame.

Dragon Horn Scale Teeth Fangs Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, the band's on its tea break and I haven't finished with the Hollin Cross Palais yet. It was the August the sprung floor was so polished nobody had the nerve to dance on it, and that was the night the dragon came up the Leeds road with its horns swept back like a man walking into a gale.

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It wanted a partner, it said, and its scales rattled like a dropped tray of cutlery when it talked. Walter Pike on the door told it the frame was too low for the likes of it. The dragon lowered its head until the spines along its neck scraped the paint off the lintel, and it said, very politely, that it had walked forty miles for one waltz and would wait all night if it had to.

Lil Ashworth ran the cloakroom and wasn't afraid of anything with a pulse or without one. She took a claw in her hand, led it to the middle of the floor, and the bandleader struck up a foxtrot out of pure fright. The dragon moved like smoke over the boards, its jaw parted just enough for the teeth to catch the glitter ball, and not one soul screamed, because it was the gentlest thing any of us had seen in years.

When the music stopped it bowed, and the hall went so quiet you could hear the gas mantles hiss. Lil asked what it wanted, now the dancing was done. It said it had only wanted to be looked at with the lights on. Then it closed its mouth around the trumpeter's last held note, tucked the sound under one of its frills, and flew back over the moor. If you go up past the scree on a clear night, you can still hear that trumpet, very faint, and nobody has ever danced to it since.