Black tribal-style design of a woman with flowing hair entwined with a winged dragon, drawn in bold solid linework on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal woman and dragon design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black tribal-style drawing shows a woman with flowing hair and a dragon with a spiked, wing-like frill curling around her. The design is built from thick tapering strokes and solid black shapes, with sharp barbs along the dragon's back and wing edges. It is shown in black only on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Woman Dragon Wing Hair Tribal

Find an artist for this

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

By the time the dragon folds its frill over the orchard wall, the fiddler has stopped playing and the bride has her hand on her hip, waiting for you to explain. You are the groom's cousin. You were the one who promised the old beast would come, because your grandmother swore it had attended every wedding in the valley for three hundred years, and nobody had told you that promises made to dragons are read very literally.

Keep reading

It lowers its head into the ring of lanterns, long as a cart and black as wet slate, its jaw working around a sprig of rosemary someone has tossed at it. Its wing-frill snaps open and the bunting catches on the barbs and streams out behind it like a flag. The bride laughs, the first real laugh since the vows, and steps forward with her hair loose down her back as though she has been practising for this all her life.

Your grandmother's ledger, when you find it later under the kitchen dresser, lists the rules in pencil: the dragon takes one dance, never two, and it must be led rather than followed. So you play the fiddle badly while the bride circles the beast with her arms out, and the creature rises on its hind legs to match her, slow and courteous, shedding fine black dust over the tablecloths. Nobody screams. Somebody at the back starts clapping in time.

When the music ends, the dragon bows, sets the bride's bouquet between its teeth, and unfurls back over the wall toward the hills. At dawn you find the rosemary on the step, and the ledger has a new line in her handwriting beneath your grandmother's: led, not followed. Dances, she has written, are for whoever lifts their arms first.