Hand-drawn neo-traditional design of a golden dragon coiled around a grey skull, shown as a flash sheet with no body placement.

Golden dragon coiled around a skull

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A golden dragon with red eyes, spiked crest and finned wings wraps its body around a large skull, with its claws gripping the cranium and its tail curling at the base. The linework is bold and dark, with the scales and fins marked by fine hatching and the skull shaded in soft greys for depth. Warm orange and yellow tones dominate the dragon, set against the pale grey and white of the skull on a plain background.

Neo-trad Dragon Skull Claw Wing Tail Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men at Wheal Hesketh had argued all winter about whether to open the old adit again, and by the time they agreed, the dragon was already in it. Nobody saw it go down. They only heard the timbers groan, and in the morning the count house door hung open and the skull of Joseph Trewin was gone from its shelf.

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Old Tamsin Rowe, who had laid out three husbands and believed in nothing she could not dress, went down the shaft alone with a candle. She came back up grey to the lips and said the thing had its body wound round Trewin's head like a man holding a stone against the wind, its claws set in the brow bone, its red eyes fixed on her light. "It wants what he took with him," she said. "The place of the lode. He never told a soul, and it's been waiting forty years for someone to say it."

Ned Carne, who was twelve and had no fear of anything underground, took the candle and went. He said the only thing he knew about Joseph Trewin, which was the song his mother sang over the washing: that the gold lay where the water runs white in summer. The dragon's eyes narrowed. Its claws loosened from the bone one at a time, like a cat letting go of a sill, and it slid off down the drift and into the dark.

In the morning they dug where Ned pointed, at the white spring under the old wheel, and found nothing but wet clay and one gold scale the size of a thumbnail. Ned kept it on a string round his neck until he was an old man, and whenever anyone asked him where the lode was, he only touched it and said the water would tell you.