Black line drawing of a coiled, serpentine dragon with filigree swirl patterns across its wings and body, shown as a standalone tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate dragon with swirling wings and tail

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon in profile with outstretched wings and a long, coiling serpentine body that ends in a curled tail with an ornate tip. The wings, head and body are filled with intricate swirling linework and decorative patterning. The design is rendered entirely in black ink on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Dragon Wing Swirl Serpent Tail Scrollwork

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came up out of the harbour the spring the lamp at Carrick Head went dark for the third time. Old Mairi Gorse said it had been sleeping under the rocks since the wreck of the salt ship, and that its wings had grown so heavy with barnacles it could no longer lift them clear of the water. Nobody believed her, though everybody went to the cliff edge to look.

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It was Tomas, the keeper's boy, who climbed down to the lamp room with a tin of lamp oil and found the glass cracked and a long coil of something silver wound around the iron stair. The coil moved when he touched it. It was the tail, and the tip of it was curled tight as a fern, and when he unrolled a little of it there were patterns cut along the scales, spirals inside spirals, like the marks his grandmother pressed into bread.

He wiped the glass with his sleeve and lit the wick. The dragon lifted its head above the rail, slowly, the swirls on its neck catching the beam and throwing it back in pale rings across the sea. Ships turned for home. Tomas kept the flame burning all night, and in the morning the dragon had folded its wings and gone back under the rocks, leaving one feather on the step, black as a wet slate and curled at the end.

The lamp has never gone dark since. Mairi keeps the feather in a tin by her door, and when the fog comes in thick she takes it out and turns it in her fingers, counting the spirals, the way you would count the years on someone who has been away a long time.