Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon head pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon head is drawn in profile, with a long curved horn sweeping back from the brow and a row of spiked ridges running along the neck and jaw. The viewer can see its glowing eye with a slit pupil, rows of sharp teeth and a clawed forearm or foreleg at the lower edge. The pencil linework is loose and sketchy, with soft shading on the scales and horns and the paper left light in the background.

Dragon Horn Teeth Scale Claw Spike

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thing under Lock Nine had been sleeping since the spring floods, and Dad swore it was only a drowned oak until the night it lifted its head beside the Marigold and breathed steam over our cabin roof. I was twelve and holding the tiller. I remember the horns first, two long curved shapes sweeping back from its brow like the handles of a pram, and then the eye, yellow as a lamp, with a black slit down the middle that went looking for me.

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Dad didn't shout. He reached for the boathook slowly, the way you'd reach for a dog that might bite. The creature's ridges rose along its neck like a row of rusted saw blades, and its jaws opened on teeth that caught the moonlight. Its foreleg came over the gunwale, claws scraping the paint off the cabin side in long pale curls. Mum was below, singing to the kettle, and she never once looked up.

What it wanted was not us. It wanted the sack of flour bound for the mill at Thornbury, stowed under the bow, which Dad had been meaning to deliver for a week. We gave it up. The dragon ate it in three mouthfuls, sneezed a cloud of white dust into the reeds, and slid back under the black water without a ripple, leaving the Marigold rocking and a single gold scale caught on the tiller.

Next morning the scale had gone, and Dad said nothing about the flour at breakfast, only that we'd keep to the middle of the channel from now on. I kept my eye on the water all the way to Gloucester. Some nights, when the lock gates groan, I still hear that long sigh, and I think it sounds almost like manners.