Black and grey pencil drawing of a dragon with spread wings coiled around a shaded human skull, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon wrapped around a skull

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon with horns and spread wings wraps its serpentine body around a skull, with its head resting above the skull's brow. The linework is fine and sketched, with soft grey shading on the bones, scales and wing membranes. The drawing is in black and grey only, centred on a plain white background.

Skull Dragon Wing Horn Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came up out of the Haddon quarry the week after the lamps failed, and it did not come for the men. It came for the skull that Mrs Pryce had kept on her windowsill since the shaft was closed, and it wound itself twice round the bone as though it were a bell rope.

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The village gathered at the chapel with paraffin lamps. Reverend Oakes said it was a judgment on the pit owners. Old Tom Harrow, who had carried powder for the quarry before his chest gave out, said dragons only want what is theirs, and everyone knew the skull had come up from the shaft in 'thirty-one with a copper coin wedged in its jaw. Nobody had ever asked whose coin it was.

Mrs Pryce went out in her husband's coat and sat on the step with her knees together. The dragon's horns caught the moon and its wings folded like wet umbrellas against the slate. It lowered its head until it rested above the skull's brow, and it breathed no fire, only a long hiss like a kettle left on the hob. She told it the skull belonged to her husband's grandfather, that the coin was meant for the ferryman, and that the boy who had taken it was buried now in Llanfair with his name spelt wrong on the stone. The dragon looked at her for a long while. Then it unwound, slid back into the black mouth of the quarry, and the skull sat on the step with its jaw empty.

In the morning the men found a fall of slate had sealed the shaft from top to bottom, and in the grey dust at its lip lay a line of scales, each one the size of a pennypiece. Mrs Pryce took the skull back to the windowsill. She said the dragon had only wanted someone to say whose it was.