Black tribal-style dragon design with swirling wings and a spiral tail wrapped around a pentagram inside a circle, drawn on white.

Tribal dragon with pentagram circle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink design of a dragon with spread, flame-like wings and a coiled tail. Its body curls around a circle containing a five-pointed star and a central solid dot, with a small spear-tip shape hanging below. The linework is bold and solid, filled with black shapes and fine brushed detail on a plain white background, in black and grey only.

Blackwork Dragon Pentagram Star Circle Wing Tail Spiral Spear Spike

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mould cracked twice before Tamis would admit the fault lay in the clay and not in his hands. The commission had come up the river from the chieftain's widow at Harrow Ford: a shield boss, its dragon wrapped around a ring, wings thrown up like smoke over a burning roof. At the ring's heart she wanted a five-pointed star, and at the dragon's jaw a slim spear-tip that would hang free and sing against the metal whenever the shield was struck. Tamis drew the star in wet ash on the workshop floor, then scuffed it out with his heel and drew it again, because the first one had too many arms.

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He poured the third mould at dusk, when the forge fire had sunk to a red breathing. His apprentice, a sullen boy called Oddo, held the tongs and complained about the smell of hot tin. By lamplight they knocked the mould apart and found the dragon whole, scales and all, its tail curled tight as a fist. Only the centre was wrong. The dot at the star's heart had cooled hollow, a small black pit where the metal had not fed.

Oddo wanted to fill it with solder. Tamis ran his thumb around the rim and thought of the widow's hand on the cloth that had wrapped her husband's spear, and how she had not asked for a pretty thing. He told the boy to leave it. When the shield was finished and carried back up the river, she struck the boss with a knuckle and the spear-tip rang, and then rang again, longer, because the hollow in the middle had caught the sound and kept it.