Black ink drawing of a three-headed dragon curled within a circle, with its body and wings filled with dense patterned linework, on a plain white background.

Three-headed dragon in a circle

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a dragon with three heads arranged around a circular frame, with a central body and wings. Fine black linework and dense hatching, dots and zigzag patterns fill the body, wings and heads, with bold outlines marking the shapes. The image is monochrome on white paper and the design fills the composition evenly.

Dragon Circle Wing Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Osric, the abbot has finally let me finish the roundel for the Michaelmas gospels, and I am writing to you from the cold scriptorium with my fingers too stiff to hold the quill properly. The three heads took me a fortnight alone. The middle one gave me the most trouble, because it has to look back over its own shoulder while the other two strain forward, and every time I inked its jaw the line wandered toward the rim. Brother Piers says a dragon that cannot keep to its circle will eat the margins, so I went over it with the finest nib I own until my eyes watered.

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The wings were the easy part once I stopped fighting them. I filled every panel with zigzags, dots and little hatched diamonds, because the abbot wants the rain to show in them, and I think he is right. When the iron gall dried it turned blacker than I expected, and the whole disc now looks like a thing that has been turning slowly in the dark for a hundred years.

Yesterday, scraping the old vellum sheet that the design was copied from, I found something under the wash that nobody had mentioned. Behind the three heads there is a fourth, drawn so faintly it is barely a stain, its mouth open as if it was about to speak. Someone started it and then stopped, and the circle was drawn around the three anyway, as though the space had been measured for four and then made to fit three.

I have not inked it in. Tomorrow the gospels go to the binder, and the dragon will sit in the corner of the page exactly as the old brother meant it to, with three heads, one circle and an empty place I have chosen not to fill.