Two flash designs on a white background: a black and grey sword with a skull and dragons, and a colour dragon coiled around a red-hilted sword with flames.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, sword and dragon flash designs

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The left design shows a large ornate sword with a skull at its centre and two dragons curling around the blade and skull, drawn in bold black and grey. The right design shows a green and blue dragon with yellow eyes wrapped around a red-hilted sword, surrounded by stylised orange and yellow flames. Both designs use solid fills and clear outlines on a plain white background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's loose, and keep your bread from the gulls, they've been robbing the fish boats since before my grandmother was born. Sit there where the lamp reaches. Now, the blacksmith at Carrick Quay had a daughter called Idony who could hear a lie through a stone wall, and the harbourmaster owed her father money.

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Her father forged a long sword that autumn for the wreck-wardens, with a red wrapped grip and a guard worked into a grinning skull. Idony waited on the anvil each evening until the coals went grey, because every night the tide dragged at the chain of the wreck Mary Penhale, and every night a sound came up through her planks like something turning over in its sleep.

On the last night of the moon the cove went black and still, and two dragons rose from it, green and blue and scaled like wet slate, their backs spitting flame like lamps on a pier. Idony took the sword from the bench, walked down the slip, and did not run. The nearer dragon lowered its yellow eyes to her. She set the point under its jaw. "Tell me what you're owed," she said, and it told her.

Nobody in Carrick will say what the dragon was owed. They will say the harbourmaster paid his debt in full by morning, and that the chain never sang again. Idony kept the sword. Her father cleaned it every Sunday, and every Sunday the skull on the guard grinned up at him as if it had got the better of the bargain.

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