Black outline drawing of a stylised dragon with scale patterning and spiral details, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Stylised dragon line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised dragon is drawn in a single black outline on a white background, with a curled serpentine body, a horned head and a pointed tail. The body is divided into scale-like panels, and spiral curls appear around the head and along the body. The design is flat and uncoloured, with even line weight throughout and open space around the figure.

Dragon Scale Spiral Horn Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Vane had been drawing the same beast on the back wall of the chandlery for eleven winters, and the damp had never once let it stay. Each spring the plaster lifted her outline, and each spring she traced it again with a pot of lamp black and a goose quill, starting at the snout where the horns fork back like oars and never lifting the pen until the tail came round to meet the spiral at its root.

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The harbour men said the dragon was the reason the tide turned early. Hester knew only that the scales she laid down in panels, one cupped shape nested inside another, always came out a little rounder than she meant, as if something underneath were pushing. Her nephew Tam, who swept the shop and wanted a berth on the Margaret Ann, watched her one January night and asked whether it was hungry. She said it was waiting for someone to finish it.

That night the lamp guttered and the beast's curls turned on the wall, slowly, the way a sleeper turns. Hester found that the line she had drawn that afternoon had grown half an inch past the tail and stopped, blunt, as if asking. She dipped the quill and, instead of closing the loop, drew a small open ring at the tip, the way a fisherman marks a buoy he means to come back for.

By morning the wall was bare except for a ring of wet black on the flagstones outside the door. The Margaret Ann had gone out on the ebb with Tam aboard, and he swore afterwards that he had seen a long shape turning beneath the hull like a ribbon of slate. Hester kept the quill. She never drew the dragon again, though she still counts the rings in the stone and finds one more each year.