Black tribal-style dragon design with a flared head and sweeping tail wrapping around an open circle, drawn in bold solid linework on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragon coiling around a circle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black tribal dragon design with its head at the left and a long, tapering tail curling below. The dragon's body and sweeping spine-like wings form a loop around an open circle at the centre. Solid black shapes with smooth, tapering edges sit on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Dragon Tribal Circle Wing Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hoop had to be true or the dragon would not take it. Tamsin had spent three weeks at the forge under Old Hallam's eye, drawing the iron out thin and folding it back until the ring sat flat on the anvil without a wobble. Hallam ran his thumb along the seam and sent her back to the fire anyway. "It has to close on its own," he said. "Nobody can close it for it."

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The dragon kept to the quarry at Hollin Scar, where the cliff had a hole worn through it that let the sky show as a bright coin. Each spring it climbed the wind above the quarry in long slow loops, its wings sweeping back like a rook's in a gale, its tail trailing down the rock face. Nobody in Harrowmere had ever asked it for anything. Tamsin climbed the scree on the last morning of March with the ring over her shoulder and her heart knocking.

The dragon came down to her out of the light and folded itself around the rim of the hole. "You have brought me a circle," it said, in a voice like a wet sail. "Most people bring me a lock." She told it the iron was true and that she did not know if it would close. The dragon laughed, a sound that came off the stone in pebbles, and took the ring in its jaws. It rolled the hoop round its own tail until the two ends met with a note like a struck bell, and then it was gone up the wind.

She found one black scale on the rock where it had lain. It was no bigger than a fingernail and cool as slate. When she held it up against the hole in the cliff, the sky inside it had filled with stars, and they hung in a loop that was not quite round.