Solid black tribal-style dragon design with a coiled, serpentine body on a white background, shown as a drawing with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragon design, vertical

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black dragon with a horned head, open jaws and a long, coiling serpentine body runs vertically down the frame. The design is drawn in solid black with bold, tapering fins and spines, and a sharp tail curls at the bottom. The plain white background isolates the outline, and no skin or body part is shown.

Blackwork Dragon Serpent Horn Fin Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came down the valley the spring the weir cracked, its horns combed back by the wind and its jaws shut tight, because nobody who had seen a dragon's open mouth in Hallowmere had lived to describe it. It did not roar. It coiled itself around the old mill wheel and lay there with its tail hooked over the sluice, waiting, the way a cat waits outside a door it knows will open.

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Maud Tennant went up with a basket of salted herring, since her father's knees would not carry him over the moor. She set it down on the wet stones. The dragon's eye, the colour of tallow, followed her hands. 'The race has gone dry,' she said. 'Since the sheep farm upstream hurdled the Lade, the wheel has not turned for a month, and there is nothing to grind but our teeth.'

The dragon lifted its head, and the fins along its neck rose like the sail of a cutter. Then it turned its body slowly, and she saw the tail was caught in a fish trap of hazel and rusted wire, the sort set for eels in the spring floods. Maud knelt in the cold and worked the wire loose one strand at a time, her fingers numb, until the spiked tail slid free and the dragon sighed like a bellows.

It left a single scale in her palm, black and thin as a fingernail, which rang when she tapped it against the millstone. By morning the Lade was running again, though nobody could say who had lifted the hurdles. Every autumn after that the wheel turned, and somewhere above the weir a long shape moved through the bracken, and the children of Hallowmere still listened for the chime of a scale dropping into the race.