Black and grey flash design of a winged dragon with its wings spread around a coiled body, with shading in silver and charcoal tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged dragon coiled in black and grey

Black and grey · Flash

A dragon design with large, angular wings that curve up and wrap around a coiled, scaled body. The head sits at the lower left, with a long serpentine tail looping across the bottom of the composition. The design uses smooth grey gradients, dark shadows and bright highlights on the wings and scales, set against a plain white background.

Dragon Wing Serpent Scale Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Marigold Bell believed Ada Pruitt when she said the dragon had come up the hull in the dog watch, its wings folded like a tent that had been dropped and gathered again. Forty days out from Valparaiso, with the water gone to lead and the men cutting their rations in half, sailors will believe a great many things. But the boatswain, Tom Harrow, went up the ratlines himself with a lantern, and came down white around the mouth, and said only that the thing had been looking at the wheel.

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It was a long dark beast, Ada said later, the colour of wet slate with a silver edge where the moon caught it. Its tail went around the mainmast three times and stayed there, loose as rope. Each night after that it coiled a little tighter, and each night the wind backed a point to the west, and the ship made a knot more than the log allowed. The captain, a hard man named Ormsby who kept his own chart and would not show it, decided the creature was a sign of a shoal in the reckoning. Ada decided it was hungry, and she began leaving the cook's bread on the rail.

On the fortieth night the wind died entirely and the sea went flat as a pewter plate. In the morning the dragon had unwound itself from the mast and lay along the deck, its great wings drawn up like a sail furled for the last time. Ormsby came up with his chart under his arm, looked at the beast for a long moment, then unrolled the chart on the hatch and set a finger on a small blank island nobody had ever marked. The dragon lifted its head, touched the spot with one claw, and slid over the side without a ripple. By noon there was a ridge of green on the horizon, and the captain never again pretended he had drawn that coast himself.