Black line drawing of a stylised dragon head with scale-patterned neck and interlaced ribbon body, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Interlaced dragon head line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a stylised dragon or serpent head in profile, with a pointed ear-like crest, a curled snout and a neck filled with overlapping scales. The body extends down into a looping, interlaced ribbon form that resembles Celtic or Norse knotwork. The drawing uses uniform black linework and open white areas with no shading or colour, set against a plain white background.

Dragon Serpent Scale Knotwork Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carpenter who carved the serpent for our prow, Eyvind Tallow-hands, would not let anyone sand its scales smooth. Every morning I scraped the salt from its jaws with the back of my knife before the porridge went on, because the galley hearth sits under its neck and the smoke climbs past its eyes. The ribbon of its body runs aft along the strakes, looping under the hull and back again, so that no single piece of it can be cut without cutting the whole.

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Gunnar wanted it burned when the wind took our mast off the Hebrides. He said a figurehead that had sulked through three winters should go back to the fire and the sea could have the rest. I told him that to take the head you would have to cut the knot, and nobody with sense cuts a knot in a gale. He called me a hen-brained cook and went back to bailing, but he kept a hand on the rail near the carving all that night.

Four days we drifted, eating the last of the hard bread soaked in whey. On the fifth morning I lit the hearth again, though the galley floor was an inch of seawater, and found that the serpent's jaw had caught a shred of kelp the sea had flung over the bow. Gulls followed us in. By afternoon the ribbon-tail was pointing at a grey line of land.

When we beached at Ormsey, Gunnar stood in the surf and laid his palm flat on the wet scales without saying anything. I shook the last handful of barley from the sack onto the sand for the gulls, the way my mother did at every harbour, and I left the serpent's head turned toward the water so it could watch the boat come in.