Coloured pen drawing of two dragons facing each other nose to nose, forming a heart shape, as a tattoo design sketch.

Two dragons nose to nose in colour

Colour · Flash

Two dragons face each other with their snouts almost touching, their bodies curling around to form a heart-like outline. The linework is loose and sketchy, with scale patterns shaded in hatching and small checkerboard and dot motifs filling the gaps. Pink, purple, orange, blue and green inks dominate, and the swirling tails trail off into curls across the white paper.

Dragon Heart Swirl Scale Dot Tail

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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

Below Sallow Weir the river ran slow and brown, and the barge Patience carried coal to the mill for her skipper, Ada Lowe, who did not believe in dragons until the night the lock jammed. The gates would not close. Ada stood on the sill with a lantern while the water rose, and out of the dark came two dragons, one the colour of a sunset over the fen, the other blue as a kingfisher's back and green along the brow.

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They did not fight. They came nose to nose in the foam and stayed there, their necks bent until the snouts almost touched, and their long tails lifted and curled around each other until the pair made a shape like the heart Ada had once chalked on the tally board for her late husband. Where the lantern caught their scales they showed small squares, pink and white, and beads of blue water sat on their backs like spilt paint.

Ada asked them what they wanted. The orange one breathed a thin warm sigh over the iron beam, and the rust went soft and slid away. The gates swung shut with a sound like a church bell. In the morning the river was clear, the mill had its coal, and the Patience went on up towards Ely with the lantern still lit on her stern.

Ada never told the mill men about the dragons. Each autumn she left a lump of coal on the lock sill, and the two shapes still rose out of the water to take it, their tails trailing away into curls of light until the current carried them off under the reeds.