Black tribal-style dragon design with spread wings, coiled body and clawed feet, drawn as a flash sheet image without a body placement.

Tribal dragon with spread wings

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black tribal dragon design shown in profile with wings spread wide, a long coiled serpentine body and clawed feet. The linework is bold, with solid black shapes cut through by white tribal bands along the wings, head and tail. The design is shown in black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Traditional Dragon Wing Claw Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lost property box had been under the stage since the millennium, and Dennis from the caretaker's office swore nobody had opened it since. Ruth Ackland lifted the lid anyway, because the reunion committee needed the trestle table filled and nobody else would touch anything that smelled of PE kit.

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Inside were a cracked compass, a school exercise book with someone else's name on the cover, and a sheet of graph paper folded into quarters. She opened it on the table. A dragon stared back at her, drawn in biro pressed so hard it had dented the page. Its wings were blades, its body coiled through the squares, and its claws hooked over the edge as if it meant to climb off the paper. She remembered it from the back of Miss Pryce's maths lesson, when her brother Colin had traded it to a boy called Gavin Teale for two Fruit Salads and a promise never to mention the Christmas disco.

Gavin was by the squash urn now, talking too loudly about a van business in Stockport. Ruth crossed the hall with the paper in her hand. He saw it before she spoke, and his face did the thing faces do when a decade walks back in unannounced. "He kept that?" he said. "Apparently you did," she said. He turned it to the light and found the white bands he had cut through the tail, each one a little wobbly, each one his.

"I did the wings," he said. "Colin did the rest. Said the dragon was too proud to have its tail done by a lad from Tuesday art." Ruth folded the sheet back along its old crease and held it out. He took it and slid it into his inside pocket, next to his wallet, as if it might still be worth two sweets.