A watercolour and ink dragon design with blue, violet and red washes, drawn as a flash sheet suitable for a tattoo.

Watercolour dragon design in blue and violet

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A serpentine dragon with a spiked head, clawed limbs and a long, finned tail is drawn in black ink outline on white paper. The linework is loose and sketchy, with the outlines varying in weight and fur-like strokes along the body. Soft watercolour washes in blue, lilac and red-orange fill the body and wisps of flame, giving a bold, painterly composition that runs diagonally up the page.

Traditional Dragon Flame Claw Spine 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

The rain had got into the paints by eleven, so the whole stall smelled of wet cardboard and turps, and every print on the trestle had started to bleed at its edges. I was pinning the last sheet to the awning string when the wind took the dragon off the table and dropped it face down in a puddle. It was only a sketch in black ink and washes, a serpent with a spiked crown and a long finned tail, but when I lifted it the blue had already run down its neck like a stream finding its level, and the lilac had pooled in the coil of its body.

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Eddie from the fish stall came over with his hood up and his hands in his pockets, and we both stared at it. The ink hadn't moved at all. The lines were still where I'd drawn them, the claws still hooked, the flames still curling off the foreleg, but the colour had wandered into the margin. Nan always said the outline was the bones and the paint was the weather. I never believed her until that morning, when the weather had got into everything and the bones were the only thing left standing.

Mr Okafor from the record shop bought it for two pounds and a promise he'd come back with a frame. He held it up to the grey light and tipped it side to side. The blue had dried into a fine tidemark along the spine, like scales catching the light, and the red-orange at the throat had softened into something close to dawn. 'It looks like it's swimming,' he said, and he was right, though I had not meant it to.

After he left I pegged the sheet back under the awning to finish drying. Water kept gathering on the lowest fin and falling, one drop at a time, and each drop pulled a little more blue down the tail, until the creature looked less like something painted and more like something wading out of the rain.