Illustrated red and gold dragon with feathered wings, set against a dark background of gold scrollwork and knotwork on a maroon border.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and gold dragon with knotwork background

Colour · Flash

A coiled, winged dragon, or phoenix-like creature, is painted in red, orange and gold, with a long body curling through the centre of the image. Its scales and wing feathers are rendered with dense, patterned hatching and fine outlines in contrasting colours. The background is dark with gold interlacing and spiral scrollwork, and the whole piece sits on a deep maroon border.

Dragon Wing Phoenix Knotwork Scrollwork Feather

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

Brother Tomas had been told the gold would last until Michaelmas, and by the third week of October he was scraping the last flakes of it from his burnisher with his thumbnail. The psalter for the island house was nearly finished. Only the margin of the Feast of Saint Brendan remained, a dark field of knotwork he had inked in rows of black, and at its centre a space the shape of a coiled animal that nobody had asked him to paint.

Keep reading

He painted it anyway, on the last night of the month, while the wind worked at the shutters and the candle guttered in the draught from the sea. Red for the body first, mixed from the madder root the ferryman had carried over from Iona. Then the wings, feather by feather, each one hatched in orange and edged with a line of gold so fine he had to hold his breath. When he reached the head it had turned towards the window, though he was certain he had drawn it facing the page.

The prior found him at dawn, asleep with his cheek on the desk and the margin finished. He stood over the coiled thing for a long time. Then he took the gold-leaf knife from its case and, without a word, scraped the leaf from his own great initial, the letter he was proudest of, and pressed it carefully into the creature's eye.

When the ink dried that afternoon the page was warm to the touch, and the smell of smoke clung to the wings. Tomas swore afterwards that the bird had blinked, once, and that the knotwork around it had shifted a little, like sleepers settling in a cold house.