Black line drawing of a serpentine dragon with a spiked back, tall wing-like fins and a curled tail, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Serpentine dragon with spiked back and wings

Black and grey · Flash

A single black outline drawing of a long, serpentine dragon-like creature with a spiked ridge along its back, a horned or crested head and tall, jagged wing-like shapes rising from its body. The linework is bold and mostly solid black with thin white highlights, and the tail curls up at the far left. The composition is a horizontal side view on a plain white background, with no colour or shading.

Dragon Serpent Wing Spine Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The helmsman had been bellowing for a full minute before Dorrie Vane looked up from the bilge pump, and by then the thing was already lifting off the port bow, a long dark body unspooling from the swell like a hawser hauled out of tar. Its back bristled with spines in a row as regular as stitching. Behind the shoulders two wings rose higher than the mainmast, jagged along their edges, the sort of sails no honest cloth could hold.

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Nobody spoke. The cook, Halloran, had already dragged the hatch covers over the galley stove and was praying in a voice that carried. The captain stood very still by the wheel, a brass lamp swinging on its hook beside him. The serpent turned its horned head toward the light and opened its long jaw, and Dorrie saw that it did not bite. It only breathed, a slow pale plume that smelled of cold stone and wet ash, and the lamp flame bent toward it as though it were being called home.

For three days the wind had been dead. The ship lay in the doldrums like a pin in a cushion, the water flat enough to read a face in. Now the serpent coiled around them, its tail curling up off the stern like a question mark, and the calm held. Dorrie kept the logbook open on her knee and counted spines when she could not sleep: forty-one along the back, then forty-one again from the other end, which seemed to her the sort of joke the sea makes.

At dawn the water wrinkled. A breeze came up from the south-west, smelling of rain, and when Dorrie climbed to the crow's nest the serpent was already a dark line sinking westward, its wings folding down into the swell. She wrote in the book, Wind returned, lamp unbroken, and beneath it, after a moment, the number she had been keeping all night.