Black tribal design of a dragon and a phoenix meeting over Celtic knotwork, shown on a pale wooden board with no body placement.

Tribal dragon and phoenix design

Black and grey · Flash

A black tribal-style design shows a dragon and a phoenix facing each other, their heads meeting above a spiral and flame-like wing patterns. A panel of interlaced Celtic knotwork runs down the centre, and the tail-like shapes taper to points at the base. The solid black shapes sit on a light wooden board, with no skin or body placement visible.

Dragon Phoenix Tribal Knotwork Wing Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have found the windfalls before you do, so you step over the split Discovery apples and keep walking toward the two old trees at the bottom of Hollin Lane. Nobody in the village has spoken plainly to the Pryces since the hedge business, and the orchard has been split down the middle by a line of hawthorn ever since. Your grandmother's grafting knife sits in your coat pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief that still smells of her hands.

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On your side stands the dark-barked tree, its limbs twisted into slow spirals that she called the dragon's coil. Across the hedge, the other tree sends out its branches like flames, and its fruit is a red so bright it looks lit from inside. You have spent all summer looking at them through the thorns. Today you cut a scion from the flame tree's oldest wood, slide it into a notch on the dragon's trunk, and bind the two cuts together with raffia, tight enough to hold and loose enough to breathe.

A bucket knocks against the hawthorn. Pryce's girl is standing there with her sleeves pushed up, her face unreadable. "Your tree's dropping on our side," she says. You look at the fallen fruit, then at the raffia on the bark. "Then it's yours too," you tell her, and she tips her bucket through a gap in the thorns, and the apples roll together in the grass.

By October the graft has taken. The seam in the trunk has healed into a ridge the colour of old rope, and the basket you carry down to the press holds both kinds of fruit, dark and red, with no way to tell which tree they came from.