Sheet of black dragon tattoo designs in tribal and silhouette styles, shown as flash on a white background.

Dragon tattoo designs in black silhouette

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows one large dragon silhouette at the top and nine smaller dragon designs below in a grid. The designs range from solid silhouettes to tribal-style patterns with interlaced linework, spiky fins and swirling tail shapes. Everything is rendered in solid black on white, with no colour and no shading beyond flat fills and fine cut-out detail.

Traditional Dragon Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby had cut the dragon four times before Mr Varley let it go up over the bandstand. The card was black on one side and brown on the other, the way the old pattern books came, and her scalpel had lost its point against a stubborn knot in the stock. The large one came first, the one that coiled back on itself like a man settling into a chair, its tail running off the edge of the sheet as though it had somewhere better to be.

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The Palais on Marram Pier had been shut since the spring, its ballroom ceiling blistered and its gilt lettering gone to rust. Varley wanted the place lit up for the Saturday dance, and he wanted the light to do the work. Nell pinned each stencil over the bare bulbs, dabbed the cut-outs with whitewash, and watched the tribal patterns bloom across the floorboards: spiked fins, tails that curled into knots, and a little serpent with a long jaw that she liked best of all because it looked faintly sly.

On the Friday night the wind came off the sea and rattled the shutters so hard that the stencils lifted and rolled. Nell chased the big dragon across the floor with her knee and her cardigan sleeve, and when she finally trapped it under her boot she found the whole ballroom tilted into its shape, the black and white swapped, the holes glowing where the lamps came through.

On Saturday the dancers arrived in their good shoes, and the floor was full of dragons nobody had painted. Their shadows slid across the boards and twisted round each other under the lamps. Varley looked up from his cash box, said nothing, and for once did not count the sixpences. Nell stood by the door and let the music carry the beast round the room one more time before anyone thought to sweep it away.