Bold black tribal-style dragon tattoo with a small red flame on a lower leg, shown in a close photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragon on a lower leg

Blackwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A black dragon coils down the leg, with a spiked head, a row of square scales along its body and a clawed foot near the bottom. A small red flame sits beside its mouth, the only colour in the design. The bold solid black linework and the flat, sweeping shapes sit against pale skin, with a plastic sheet visible behind the leg.

Blackwork Calf Dragon Flame Serpent Scale

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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

Mind the third step, the one that rocks, and keep your hand on the wall where the ivy's thin. Good. Now sit where the old gate was, because this is where the dragon came up out of the moat, and I want you to see the path it took.

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Its body was black as a wet hearth and it wound up the hill like a rope somebody had dropped and forgotten. Every scale was a square cut stone, so the lord's masons swore it was only a wall that had got up and walked. Its head had spines like a crown of broken oars, and when it turned to look at the gatehouse, the sky went the colour of rust.

Now, the lord had one daughter, Ysolde, and she was the only one who had not run. She carried a bread knife and a jar of lamp oil down the spiral stair to the cellar, where the dragon could not fit its shoulders. Nobody ever told her she was brave. She just wanted the bread, and the bread was in the cellar, and the dragon was in the way.

So she waited until its neck came through the arrow slit, and she struck a match on the stone, and the dragon breathed out one small flame to meet it. That's the flame you see, the one red thing in all that black. It was the last of the fire it had, and it has never burned anything since.

And the castle? Well, it fell down the next winter, stone by stone, the way castles do when nobody is living in them. But the dragon is still on the hill, if you look in the right light. Go on, then. Mind the third step.