Black line drawing of a tribal-style dragon with a swirling scrollwork tail on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal-style dragon with swirling tail

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised dragon head with a curling crest and flowing body is drawn in solid black lines. Bold, tapering strokes form spirals and scrollwork along the tail and around the head. The design is shown in black on white with no shading, greys or colour, and it is centred with open space around it.

Dragon Swirl Scrollwork Tail Crest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tolley counted the Lamplight Circus's remaining seats from the ring curb, twenty-three of them, and decided the dragon would have to earn its keep tonight. The banner over the entrance had been painted in 1931 by a man called Osric Dunn, who gave the beast a crest like a fan of burnt paper and a tail that spiralled into the canvas, thick as a thumb at the root and thin as thread at the tip. Half the tail had flaked away in the wet spring, and nobody had the money to fix it.

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The dragon act was Mags's own invention: a sequinned sheet, a bamboo pole and a boy named Teddy Rook working the head from below while she danced the tail. Teddy had gone to the coast in February for a trawler berth and never written. Tonight she would manage alone, which meant tying the papier-mache head to her shoulder with a length of blue ribbon and praying the knots held through the first bow.

The lamps went down. Twenty-three people made no sound at all, which was worse than jeering. She climbed the pole and the wire hummed under her palms. When she turned, the spotlight caught the banner through the open flap, and for a moment the old scrollwork seemed to slide along the canvas, curling upward towards her as though it wanted a part in the show.

She came down, bowed, and found the front row on its feet. A small girl in a borrowed coat was tracing the tail in the air with one finger. "It goes round and round," the girl said. "Does it ever stop?" Mags untied the ribbon and said that depended entirely on who was holding the end.