Colour flash drawing of a serpentine dragon with a long horned head, filled with pastel teal, pink and purple and decorated with black scrollwork, in a neo-traditional style.

Pastel serpentine dragon flash design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A serpentine dragon with a long horned head faces left, its body covered in black scrolls, flourishes and dotted lines. The outlines are bold and the body is shaded in soft teal, pink, purple and yellow pencil or marker. The design is centred on a plain cream background, with its long tail curling down to the lower edge.

Neo-trad Dotwork Dragon Serpent Scroll Flourishes Dot Horn

Find an artist for this

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 travelling show had been losing its colour for three winters, and by the spring Marta Oake came to the fairground with the last of the paint in a tin. The big top sagged in the middle like an old horse. The lions had gone to a zoo in Leeds, and the strongman had gone to the sea. Only the dragon was left, a long painted serpent on the side of the wagon, its horned head turned towards the gate as if it were waiting for someone to pay.

Keep reading

Nobody believed the old tale that the dragon had been painted from a real beast, that it had swum up the Ouse one summer and let a girl comb the scrolls from its mane. Marta believed it, because she had been that girl, and because the scrolls on the wagon were still stiff with her grandmother's black ink.

She stood on the step with the tin and began to paint over the rust on the tail. The teal would not match the old teal, so she mixed in yellow until the curl ran from green to cream and then to a faint pink at the tip. Her brother came out and laughed at her for wasting paint on a thing that could not pay them. She told him a dragon does not need to pay. It only needs to be seen.

That night the wind came off the flats and the gate creaked open on its own. In the morning the wagon was gone, and so was the tin, but a little way down the lane the grass had been pressed flat in a long curving line, the shape of a tail, ending in a neat ring of dots.