Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragon design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black tribal-style dragon facing right, with a spiked crest, open jaw and a long body that coils down into a curled tail. The linework is made of solid black shapes with white negative space cut into them, and the body is built from interlocking, ribbon-like bands. The design is shown in pure black on white with no shading or extra colour, and it fills a tall, narrow composition.

Blackwork Dragon Tribal Knotwork Tail Crest

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Harrow swore the dragon over the mill door at Gosling Bridge had been cut from a single length of strap iron, and that the smith who made it never lifted his hammer until the tail was curled. Nobody in Thornely believed her, but Jem did, because her hands were never still and she only told things she had seen.

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Jem was sent to the forge the spring Ada Penhallow came asking for a gate that would not rust. The smith, Tobias Wren, had a cough, a temper and a habit of singing to the bellows. He gave Jem a bar of bent strap and told him to make the knot first, the place where the body crosses itself, because a dragon that cannot hold itself together will never hold a door.

Jem worked three nights. Each band he drew over the last until the spine looped back on itself like a river finding the same field twice. When the crest came out with its spikes cut clean, Wren ran his thumb along the white gaps and said nothing, which was as good as praise. Then Ada came for the gate, looked at the dragon's open jaw, and asked why it was biting nothing.

Jem had no answer, so he heated the iron and bent the tail the other way, so the curl pointed through the gate towards the mill race. Wren laughed until he had to sit down on the coal bucket. The gate still hangs at Gosling Bridge, and when the river runs high the tail is the first thing under water and the last thing to rust.