Black tribal-style winged dragon above a shaded pentagram medallion with a small red stone, tattooed across a woman's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged dragon and pentagram across upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo across the upper back shows a winged dragon with a curling tribal-style body, its wings sweeping outwards and a long tail of swirls trailing below. A circular pentagram medallion sits at the centre, shaded in grey with a small red stone at its middle. The bold black linework is smooth and symmetrical, and the design is framed by bare skin and the top of a dark garment strap.

Back Dragon Wing Pentagram Medallion Swirl 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

In the fishing town of Skerrow, the harbourmaster kept a brass medallion in his desk drawer, a star inside a ring with a drop of red glass at its heart. Fishermen had seen the dragon rise from the bay every autumn for three generations, its wings spread wide like sails, and it always turned towards the harbour where the nets came up heaviest.

Keep reading

Old Mags Penhallow, who mended nets on the quay, said the dragon could be bargained with once and only once. In the grey hour before the turn of the tide she rowed her husband's boat out past the breakwater, the medallion wrapped in oilcloth at her feet, until the water went black and glassy. The dragon rose beside the boat, its tail coiling off the surface like a hawser off a winch, and asked what she wanted for the town.

She told it the harbour would never again take more than it needed. Then she asked for her son back from the trawler that had gone down in March. The dragon studied the star for a long time. It said the sea kept what it was given and would not return a boy, but it would take the red stone and wear it in its own chest, so that every boat would find its way home on a fair wind.

Mags unwrapped the medallion and let it slide into the water, and the stone went with it. Her son did not come home. But on still mornings the fishermen say a faint red glow moves beneath the harbour wall, and the nets come up light on the days they ought to be heavy, which is how Skerrow knows the dragon is keeping its word.