Black tribal flash design of two dragons with outstretched wings forming a heart, with a small rose at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragons forming a heart with a rose

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two tribal-style dragons with wings spread outward, their heads meeting at the top centre to form the outline of a heart. A small rose with a thin stem sits at the bottom point of the heart. The linework is bold and solid black on a white background, with fine hatched detail in the wing membranes.

Blackwork Dragon Heart Rose Wing Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the two dragons of Hollin Wall came down from the slate roofs to drink at the well in Mother Agnes's garden, and every spring they quarrelled over who had the right to the first mouthful. The villagers pegged their washing between the apple trees and stayed indoors until the quarrel burned itself out. Nobody had ever seen it end in anything but smoke.

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This year it was the younger one, Tesh, who ran out of breath first. He came down the wall with his wings folded tight and his jaw working, and the old one, Varrow, did not even lift his head from the water. "You have your mother's face," Varrow said. "Pig-headed. She liked to be right too."

Tesh did not answer. He looked instead at the rose growing against the south wall, the one Agnes had planted the year her husband went to sea, and he saw that its thorns had caught the hem of a child's smock left out on the line. The child was crying at the kitchen door. Tesh lowered his head, took the cloth gently in his teeth and worked it free without tearing a stitch.

Varrow watched him do it and said nothing for a long while. When at last he spoke, the quarrel had gone out of his voice. "Drink first," he said. "The well is deep enough for both of us. It always was." They drank side by side with their heads bowed together, and by morning the rose had opened on the wall.