Black and grey flash design of a winged dragon coiled around a Celtic cross filled with interlaced knotwork.

Dragon wrapped around a Celtic cross

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A winged dragon with a scaled body and clawed feet wraps around a tall Celtic cross, its head facing right with open jaws. The cross is decorated with interlaced knotwork panels, and the dragon's wings spread across the upper and lower sections of the design. The drawing uses dark outlines with shading on the scales and wings, in black ink and grey tones on a white background.

Neo-trad Dragon Celtic knot Wing Claw Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came up the valley road in the wet spring of the year the abbey bell cracked. It came slowly, because its wings were folded tight and it had been sleeping in the bog for a long time. Nobody in Calder Dale wanted it. The monks wanted it gone, the farmers wanted it fed less often, and on the third Sunday after Easter they dragged the stone cross out of the churchyard and laid it across the road like a gate.

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Brother Alun cut the knotwork into the shaft that summer. He said a thing that could not find its end would stop wanting to leave. He carved each loop so it ran into the next, a rope with no tail. When the dragon reached the cross it wound itself twice around the shaft and stopped, and its wings spread over the crossbar like the sails of a ship that had given up on the sea.

For seven years it stayed. Children brought it bread on a stick. The abbot grew old and forgot why he had wanted the stone moved, and the dragon forgot how to be angry. In the end people only argued about the knots, because nobody could say where one loop began. Then a drover's girl traced one with her wet finger and found the line running back to her own palm.

She did not untie anything. She followed the carving to the top of the cross, and the dragon lifted its head from the stone and looked east at the hills it had come from. Then it unwound itself, one loop at a time, and went back up the valley road in the rain.