Black tribal dragon design with spread wings, a long curled tail and small red eyes, drawn on a plain white background.

Tribal dragon with spread wings

Mixed · Flash

A dragon viewed from above with its wings fully spread and its long tail curling at the bottom of the image. The design uses bold solid black tribal shapes with grey drop shadows, and the wings are built from sweeping spiked bands. The only colour is a small red accent in the eyes, against an open white background.

Dragon Wing Tail Horn Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river Vell had run dry the summer the tithe-master came up from the coast with his ledger and his two clerks. He counted the sheep in Harrow Mere and the barrels in Oss, and when he reached the miller's widow at the bend he wrote down a figure no one could pay. She went home and sat on her step until dusk, turning a cracked bowl in her lap.

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That night a shadow came over the valley so wide that the children ran indoors thinking it was rain. It was the dragon of the high crags, her wings spread from ridge to ridge, and she folded them only long enough to speak. Her voice was dry as a reed. She said that the ledger had been kept by men who thought the valley belonged to them, and that she had kept the valley longer than their grandfathers had kept their names.

The widow did not beg. She asked the dragon what the river would cost. The dragon looked down at her with its red eyes and said that a river was never sold, only lent, and the loan was paid by remembering where the water came from. Then the great tail uncurled from the hills, and where it struck the bed of the Vell, water came up through the stones like breath.

In the morning the tithe-master found the ledger soaked through and the page with the widow's name gone to pulp. He tried to write the figure again and his pen would not move. The clerks swear the river ran faster than it had in living memory, and that somewhere above the mill a long dark shape was still curled on the hillside, waiting to be asked.