Black line drawing of a winged dragon with a lattice-patterned wing and a coiled, knotted tail, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged dragon line design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A winged dragon with its head turned to the right and its tail curling into a loop at the bottom. The wings are filled with a fine lattice and cell pattern, and the body is built from interlocking bands and scrollwork. The design uses solid black outlines on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Geometric Dragon Wing Lattice Knotwork Tail Scrollwork

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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

Brother Anselm had copied the same psalm forty times before the dragon came down from the window and asked him to stop. Its voice was dry, like pages turning in a cold room. 'You have drawn my tail too short,' it said, 'and a tail that is too short cannot tie itself up for the winter.'

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Anselm set down his quill. The abbey at Coldharbour had no stories that were not written in its margins, and he had never once thought a margin might talk back. 'Where is your tail?' he asked, because it seemed the polite thing to ask.

'In the river, under the mill. The miller's son cut it off for a bet and sold it to a cooper. The cooper made it into a barrel hoop, and the barrel went to sea.' The dragon shifted its wings, and the lattice on them rattled faintly like a gate. 'I am not angry. I am only untidy.'

So Anselm went. He walked the valley road with a lantern and a heel of bread, and he found the cooper's grandson drinking at the inn in Thorne, who swore on his mother's grave that the hoop had been sold to a fishmonger in Lynn. The fishmonger had used it to bind his nets. Anselm unpicked the nets by candlelight, and there, coiled among the weed and the lead weights, was a band of iron scrollwork the length of a man's arm, its ends still cold from the sea.

He carried it back up the hill in both arms. When he laid it on the page, the dragon sighed and lifted its tail, and the loop closed with a sound like a latch. Morning bells rang across the wet fields. The dragon was gone from the window, but the psalm was finished, and in the bottom corner, where Anselm had drawn nothing at all, a small curl of ink was tying itself into a knot.