Black silhouette design of a three-headed dragon with its body curled inside a circle, shown as a bold blackwork flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three-headed dragon in a circle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black silhouette of three dragon heads, each with open jaws and spiked crests, sits within a circular outline. The wings and serpentine body are formed by solid black shapes with clean, sharp edges and no shading. The design is shown in black on a plain white background, with the body curling around the circle to fill the space evenly.

Blackwork Dragon Circle Wing Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been chiselling the dragon into the lintel for nine days, and the harbourmaster's boy still asks which head is the oldest. You tell him none, because they were cut in the same wet week of the same winter, and because the slate on Corran Holm splits along the grain whichever head you favour. Your mallet sounds across the empty quay like someone knocking to be let in.

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The commission came from the Widow Averill, who wanted wings broad enough to cover a coffin. She paid in tinned peaches and a brass compass that only ever points at the pub. You drew the body first, a single line that rises from the first head, slips under the second, climbs through the wing and curls back to bite its own tail. You had meant to leave a gap at the top, where the sea wind comes through. The widow would not allow it.

On the last evening the lamp at the Skerry light failed, and you climbed the gallery to mend it. From up there you could see the whole island laid out like a plate: the churchyard, the boats drawn up on the shingle, your own cottage with its door standing open. The village sat inside a ring of black rock exactly like the one you had cut, and every road on it came back down to the harbour.

You climbed down, took up the chisel, and cut a narrow notch through the circle at the crest of the third head, so the tide could come in and go out again. The next morning the widow ran her thumb along the groove and said nothing, which is how you knew she had seen it.