Black line drawing of a dragon in a bold tribal-style outline, with a raised wing, coiled body and spiral tail, on a white background.

Tribal-style dragon design with curled tail

Black and grey · Flash

A single dragon in profile, with a horned head, open snout, raised wing and a long serpentine body that ends in a tight spiral tail. The linework is solid black with tapered strokes of varying thickness and no shading. The design is centred on a plain white background.

Dragon Wing Tail Spiral Horn Serpent

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been up the ladder since midnight, and the dragon on the bakery shutter still had no tail. She had drawn its neck in one long stroke the way her grandfather taught her, thick at the shoulder and thinning to nothing, and the wing now hung off the frame like a slack sail. Below her Lantern Street had gone quiet in the way it only did after two, when the last night bus had sighed away and the only traffic left was foxes and the bins.

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Dev came across from the car park with two teas from the all-night van and stood looking up at her. "You know you'll get nicked for this."

"Only if someone's awake to ring it in." She took the tea without looking down. "It needs a spiral. Tight, like the coil on a mooring rope. It has to curl back towards the door handle so it looks like it's guarding the bread."

"Does it need guarding?"

"Everything in this street needs guarding. Mr Abbott has been locking his bins since March."

She worked the brush down from the haunch, past the crook of the hip, and let the line run out into a curl that tightened as it went. Dev watched the last turn close, a small, hard knot of black that looked less painted than pressed into the metal. When the first van turned into the lane at quarter to five, its headlamps swept across the shutter and the dragon seemed, for an instant, to fold its wing and settle. Nell climbed down and wiped her hands on her jeans. At six the baker rolled the shutter up and found a creature looking straight past him at the loaves, its tail wound twice round the handle as if it had always been there.