Black ink flash design of a dragon with spread wings above an interlaced Celtic knot, with no body placement shown.

Dragon with Celtic knotwork design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black dragon head and outstretched wings sit above a three-lobed Celtic knot, with the knot's loops forming the lower half of the design. The linework is bold and brush-like, with no shading, and the design is set against a plain white background. It is shown in black ink only.

Blackwork Dragon Celtic knot Wing Knotwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was already late when Mrs Pascoe sent you down the slipway with a coil of tarred rope over your shoulder and orders not to look at the water. Everyone in Porthkennack knew what sat under the breakwater at low tide, black and folded, its wings laid flat along the stones like wet sailcloth. You were eleven and had never believed the stories, which is why you looked.

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What you saw was the head first, lifted clear of the weed, its jaw resting on the lowest step. Its eye was pale as a boiled egg, and it was watching the knot you had tied that morning on the mooring post, the three-looped one your grandfather taught you, where one rope passes under, over, under and comes back to where it began. The dragon made a low sound, not quite a growl. It was not hungry. It wanted the knot checked.

You had tied it wrong, of course. The third loop was slack by a finger's width. You knelt on the wet step and pulled it true while the sea drew back around its scales, and the dragon watched every turn. When you finished, it lowered its head and the wings lifted a little, the way a gull shifts before flight, and the whole harbour gave a creak of timber and chain, as though everything in it had been held in place by a single pull.

Mrs Pascoe was furious when you came up with wet knees. Nobody else ever saw the dragon again, though the boats swung true on their moorings for sixty years after. Sometimes, on still evenings, you still tie a rope in that three-looped way and draw it tight, and think of a pale eye waiting for the third loop to hold.