Black ink tribal dragon design on white paper, with a horned head facing left, spiked wings and a barbed tail, shown without any body placement.

Tribal dragon design in solid black

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black line drawing of a horned dragon in a tribal style, with its head facing left, a sweeping serpentine body, spiked wings and a long barbed tail. The forms are solid black with white negative space cut into them, giving a graphic, high-contrast look. The design is centred on a plain white background with no body part or other objects visible.

Blackwork Dragon Horn Wing Tail Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the windfalls, they'll turn your ankle. The dragon in Hollin Orchard was not the thing the children thought. It was not green, and it did not sleep under the hill. It was the colour of old ink, coiled round the trunk of the oldest Bramley since the wall fell, holding the tree up the way a man holds a sack he cannot afford to drop.

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Each August the wind came off the ridge and shook the boughs. Old Mabs Tranter climbed up with a basket on her hip, and whenever she reached for the highest fruit the dragon lifted its horned head and watched her with those cut-white eyes. 'Not yet,' she'd say, the way you soothe a dog. Her son asked why she bothered talking to a beast made of shadow. She said it was the only thing in the valley that never lied about where its wings were.

The year it rained for forty days, the tail began to move. Its barbs crept down the lane toward the Tranter gate, and the spiked wings lifted off the bark like sails. Mabs knew what that meant. The orchard had been sold to men from the city, and they had come with their surveyors' poles and their paper. A dragon does not sit still when its trees are being measured for cutting.

On the last night of August she walked out with a lantern and set a pail of windfalls at the base of the trunk. By morning the surveyors' stakes lay snapped in the grass, and the wyrm had wound itself back round the Bramley, tail tucked under like a cat. The men left by noon. I cannot tell you what they told their bosses. I can tell you that Bramley fruited so heavy that autumn the boughs cracked, and you can go and look at it yourselves.