Black ink flash drawing of a dragon head with densely patterned scales, spiky frills and a red eye, suitable as a design for a tattoo.

Patterned dragon head in pen and ink

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A dragon head in profile is drawn in black fineliner on white paper, with a red eye as the only colour. The surface is filled with swirls, circles, cross-hatching and stippled dots that create texture across the scales, jaw and crest. The composition fills a tall, narrow frame, with the head turned left and the spiked frill and curved neck sweeping down the right side.

Dotwork Dragon Scale Swirl Spike Eye

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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

You arrive at Gull Terrace in February with a suitcase that has lost one wheel, and Mrs Pennock hands you the key to room four without looking up from her crossword. The house smells of damp wool and boiled cabbage. Breakfast is at eight. The sea is loud enough at night that you stop hearing it by the second week, which is what she promised.

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Under the bed you find a sheet of cartridge paper rolled tight and tied with bootlace. Inside, in black fineliner, is a dragon's head turned to the left, its crest spiking off the top of the page like frost on a railing. Every scale is filled: spirals, rings, a hatching of tiny strokes along the jaw. Only the eye is coloured, a red so careful it looks wet. On the back, in pencil, someone has written: For the one who stays past March. Keep the tide off.

You ask Mrs Pennock, who says her brother Alf drew them, one every winter, pinned under the bed of whoever was lodging. He was a signwriter in Margate until a stroke took the steadiness from his right hand, and he took up the pen after that because it was all he had left to do. "Thirty years of them," she says. "Sea never once came up the stairs." She says it the way a person recites a rule.

That night the wind rattles the sash and you lie awake listening for the water. It does not come. Instead you hear, very faintly, the scratch of a nib on paper from the room below, steady and patient, a thousand small circles being finished one at a time. In the morning the dragon's neck has grown a new curl at the bottom of the page, and your name is written inside it.