Black tribal-style dragon design with a horse-like head and curling tail ending in outlined bubbles, drawn on paper.

Tribal seahorse dragon design with bubbles

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold tribal-style creature with a horse-like head, flowing mane and a long curling tail that ends in a cluster of outlined bubbles. The design uses solid black filled shapes with white negative space and fine stippled shading along the edges of the mane and tail. It is shown in black ink on a cream paper background, with a faint pencil sketch visible at the right.

Blackwork Dragon Seahorse Tribal Bubble Mane Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and mind the vinegar. The seat's dry. I'll tell it once, and you'll not ask me twice, because I get the bubbles wrong when I'm tired. Forty years ago the lamps along Pier Street went out one February night, and the whole harbour turned the colour of old pewter. Out past the breakwater a horse came up out of the water with a dragon's crest on its head, a mane black and sharp as flint, and a tail as long as a mooring rope. Where it breathed, the tail left a trail of small round bubbles that rose and popped under the streetlights.

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Nobody in Cutter's Quay would go near it. Old Mabel at the fish market said it was the drowned bell of St Brannoc's, come up to ring the tide in. Her grandson Tom didn't believe a word and took his father's skiff out alone. He found the creature tangled in a net off the sea wall, its tail wrapped round a tin trunk. It turned its head, looked at him with one eye like a wet coin, and said nothing at all. So Tom cut the net. That was the first thing he did right.

After that, the creature gave him a bubble for every true word he spoke, and each one was worth a penny at the Crown in the morning. Tom grew rich on honesty for a year, which is a sorry business. Then the bank wanted its money and his father wanted his skiff back, and Tom lied to them both before breakfast. The bubbles stopped. The seahorse curled its tail round the last one, the outlined one, and rose into the dark.

Here's the bit I always leave out for the children. Tom still has that last bubble. He keeps it in a jar on the windowsill, and when the wind comes off the water it rattles like a small bell. Go on, lad, we're shutting. Mind the step. And don't go telling anyone I said the bell was real.