Black ink line drawing of a stylised dragon with long tapering lines and a coiled body, shown as a tattoo design on plain white paper.

Stylised dragon line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised dragon drawn in bold black ink, with its head in profile at the upper left and a long, sinuous body curling down the page. The linework varies from thick tapered strokes to fine hairlines, with a spiral near the top and a small circle along the lower body. The image is black on white with no colour, and a thin horizontal guide line crosses the middle of the page.

Dragon Spiral Swirl Linework Design

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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

Sit by the oven door, lad, where the bricks hold the heat, and mind the flour on your sleeve. Before the carts come down from the hill, I'll tell you about the dragon that lived in the flue of this bakehouse, back when my grandmother's grandmother kneaded here in the dark.

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She was no beast to fear. Her head came out of the chimney each night about the hour the bread went in, thin as a heron's neck, with a crest like a snapped sprig of ash. She'd watch the loaves rise, and when a girl named Hester Pell burned her hand on the peel one winter, the dragon curled round the warm brick and breathed a little breath of heat into the dough so it would never scorch again. That's why our tin loaves still come out pale and sweet at the crust.

But the dragon grew restless in the flue. She wound herself tighter and tighter, round the chimney, round the copper, round the old iron ring where the sack-hooks hang, until the bakehouse had no room left but for her coil. Hester's father wanted her gone with a broom. Hester took a ball of dough the size of a fist, rolled it thin as a ribbon and laid it across the spiral, a loop for every turn of her tail. The dragon uncurled, read the loop, and slid out through the vent into the cold morning, leaving one ring of warm bread on the hearthstone.

Mind where you step in the morning, lad. There's a ring of pale crust under the flour bin that never went stale, and if you look up at the first light you'll see the faint marks of her scales on the sill, fine as pen strokes, where she climbed out to find another oven that needs minding.