Black tribal-style dragon flash design with a coiled S-shaped body and spiked head, drawn in solid black on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragon design in black

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon design coiled in an S shape, with a spiked head, flowing spines along its back and a curled tail. Bold solid black shapes are separated by thin white lines, with no grey shading. The subject is centred on a plain white background with no colour.

Dragon Tribal Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps had found the windfalls before Nell did, so she was already cross when she climbed the ladder at the top of Tanner's Orchard and saw the thing lying along the bottom wall. It was black as wet slate and folded into an S, its head propped on the stone, its spines lifting and settling in the heat like a row of unlit candles. Her grandfather had told her about the dragon as a joke, and she had never believed him.

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It did not look at her. Its eye was a sliver of white in the dark of its head, and the pale lines that ran along its jaw and back were the only light on the whole hillside. 'You've left the gate open,' it said, in the flat voice of someone who had been saying the same thing for four hundred years. 'The frost will come in through it.'

The orchard was to be sold at Michaelmas, her father said, and the men with the surveyor's poles would have the trees out by spring. Nell told the dragon this on the third evening, sitting on the wall with her boots against its spines. It turned its head slowly. 'Then pick the lot,' it said, 'but leave me the last apple on the crooked bough, and I will keep the frost off the rest until the buyers have all gone home.'

She did as it asked. She picked until her palms were stained brown and the ladder creaked in the dark, and on the last morning of August she found the crooked bough bare except for one hard green apple. When she looked down the wall, the dragon had gone, and there was only a curl of pale line pressed into the dust, shaped exactly like the tail of an S.