Red line drawing of a dragon in flight with spread wings and a long trailing tail, shown on a plain white background as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red line drawing of a flying dragon

Colour · Flash

A single dragon is drawn in red outline, flying to the right with its wings spread wide and its tail trailing behind. The linework is loose and sketchy, with feathered strokes marking the wing membranes and the body, and no shading or fill. The design sits centred on a plain white background, with the red ink as the only colour.

Dragon Wing Tail Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin Rowe had spent three days on the dragon for the bow of the Gannet's Pride, and Mr Pascoe kept coming down the slipway to say it looked like a kite that had lost its string. She knelt on the planks with a tin of red lead and a brush worn down to nine hairs, sketching the wings in long, loose strokes so the membranes looked as if they were still deciding whether to fill with wind.

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"It's meant to be flying," she said when he came again. "Not parked." He grunted, lit his pipe, and studied the tail she had let trail back over the stem like smoke from a chimney. Beyond the harbour wall the sand bar showed grey at low water, the place where the Ellery brothers had gone under in February. Nobody in Porthmellin said their names twice.

The boat went out on the Thursday. By teatime the wind had come round to the south-west and the lamps along the quay were going out one by one. The women stood at the wall counting masts. Tamsin climbed to the lookout hut with her father's storm lantern and held it high until her arms shook. Then the Gannet's Pride came over the bar with her sails torn, and the painted dragon at the bow caught the last of the light, wings spread, tail streaming. It seemed to Tamsin that the dragon was leading them in and not the boat following it.

In the morning Pascoe found a smear of red lead along the rail, pressed there where a hand had gripped it all night. He looked at it for a long while and said nothing about kites. He left the tail exactly as she had painted it.