Black and grey pencil drawing of a winged dragon with a red eye, shown as a tattoo design without any body placement.

Winged dragon tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed winged dragon is drawn in graphite pencil, shown front on with its wings spread wide and its head raised between two horns. The linework is dense and ornamental, with fine hatching, layered scales and swirling shading across the wings, body and tail. Only the dragon's eye is coloured, in red, against an otherwise grey and black composition on a pale background.

Dragon Wing Horn Claw Scale Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The salt wardens of Coll Reach had a rule that no one climbed the Ashbridge cliffs after the tide turned, and Ottilie Varr broke it the night the lighthouse went dark. She carried a lamp of cracked brass and a coil of wire rope up the black stone, and at the top she found the thing that had been circling the sound for three generations. It was folded into the cliff face like a sleeping moth, its wings lifting and settling in slow waves of ridged bone and grey membrane, each scale pricked with hollows that caught her lamplight like wet pebbles.

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It had one eye open. The eye was red, the red of a coal the wind has not yet taken, and it watched her with a patience older than the lighthouse. Ottilie had expected roaring. Instead the creature shifted its horned head and let out a breath that smelled of rain on hot iron, and the lamp in her hand steadied, as if someone had quietly turned up the wick.

She told it about the light. The keeper's son had gone out in a skiff to fetch a drowned net, the fog had come down thick as wool, and the lamp had failed because the oil was thin and nobody had come up the cliff to replace it. She told the dragon her own name, and that she was the only person left on Coll who could read the old tide tables. The creature listened, claws curled over the rock, its tail coiling down the cliff like a rope of smoke.

By dawn the fog had lifted, and the lighthouse beam swept the water again, steady and white. Ottilie went down with the rope burning her palms. Some said the red eye had come to the Reach to guard it. Ottilie only knew that the lamp was lit, and that when she looked back at the cliff at first light, the wings were spread across the stone, pale as a sail, waiting for the next tide to turn.