Black and grey pencil drawing of a long serpentine dragon with a feathered head, segmented body plates and scaled sections, shown as a tattoo design.

Serpentine dragon line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a long serpentine dragon winding back and forth down the page, with a finned, feathered head at the top and a spiked, curling tail at the bottom. The body alternates between rows of segmented plates and scaled sections, with hatched shading that gives the form volume. The drawing is in black and grey on a plain off-white background and fills the frame vertically.

Dragon Serpent Scale Spiral Feather Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Everyone in Hollin Bank called it the Dragon, long before the council gave it a number on the map. It climbed the fell from the chapel in eleven folds, each bend a hump of granite setts followed by a stretch of scaled gravel that rattled under the tyres like dried peas. The quarry lorries took it in second gear with their lamps swinging over the drop, and the drivers swore it had a temper.

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My father laid the first setts in the spring of 1952, working from a drawing Tom Ashby had made on the back of a feed sack at our kitchen table. Tom was a bad singer and a worse cook, but he could draw a beast. He gave it a crest like the top of a hawthorn hedge, a jaw full of teeth so the gate lads would think twice, and a tail that curled down into the quarry dust with spikes along its back. Every bend was a fresh coil, he said, and a road shaped like that would never try to run off anywhere.

The winter the sixth bend slumped, Tom would not let the council patch it with tar. He said a dragon wanted proper scales, so he and my father dug the setts out by hand and reset each one, counting aloud under a paraffin lamp while the frost came up through the ground. I rode up with the milk van that January and found Tom alone at the bend, his breath smoking, pressing a plate into the mud with his boot.

He did not look up. He said the tail was the hard part, because the last bend had to come round the old gatepost and meet the tip of the road exactly, or the whole beast would be lame. Headlights from the quarry crept up the fell behind us and swept over the spikes of the gatepost, the stones gleaming wet. Tom laid the final sett in the dark, sat back on his heels, and said that was the dragon done, and now it could rest.