Black tribal dragon design on a white background, rearing up with spiked wings, clawed forelimbs and a curled tail, shown as a flat flash drawing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragon silhouette design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a dragon standing upright, with a horned head, open jaws, spiked wing membranes and a long segmented tail that curls at the bottom. The design uses bold, flat shapes with no shading, and the points and cut-outs on the wings and body give it a tribal look. It is shown in black only on a plain white background with the whole figure centred.

Dragon Wing Tail Claw Horn Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon had to be cut in one go, Nan said, because a line that stopped and started showed the hand that had hesitated. She held the black card flat on the kitchen table in Staithes while the gas fire ticked, gave me the snips, and told me to keep my wrist still.

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We had nine weeks until the Sunday school concert and a lantern that wouldn't hold its flame. The wings were the trouble. Every spike was a notch cut into the edge, and where the notches went through, the lamplight came out in little stabs across the chapel hall wall. Nan said a silhouette had no face to hide behind, so it had to say everything with its outline. I cut the jaw open twice and taped it back, and she said that was fine, the dragon had been in a fight.

On the night, the lamp sputtered during the second hymn and the hall went dark except for the dragon, which reared up the wall as big as a fishing smack's sail. Mr Harrow at the back stopped singing. Nobody spoke. Then the tail, made of seven segments hinged with split pins, swung the way Nan had tested it at home, and the children began to shout the way children do when they are not afraid.

Afterwards she folded it into a biscuit tin and handed it to me without a word. The card was warm from the lamp. I still have it, with the tail mended in brass wire, and when I hold it to the window before dawn the light comes through the notches before the sun does.