Painted dragon design with spread bat-like wings, clawed feet and a long scaled tail coiled at the bottom, shown on a plain background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged dragon with coiled scaled tail

Colour · Flash

A dragon with spiked horns, glowing orange eyes and open jaws grips the frame with clawed hands and feet, its wings spread behind it in deep reddish-brown membrane. Its long serpentine tail curls in a loose loop along the lower part of the image, with iridescent green, blue and gold scales rendered in fine detail. The painting uses soft shading and rich colour against a plain light background, so the design could be cut out as a standalone piece.

Dragon Wing Scale Claw Horn Serpent Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have already found the windfalls under the Bramley trees, so you step carefully over the bruised fruit on your way to the old wall where the dragon sleeps. Its wings are folded like a coat thrown over a chair, rust-brown and worn thin at the edges, and the scales along its coiled tail catch the late light in green and gold, as if someone had spilt paint on the bark and left it to dry. Mrs Adeyemi says it came over the ridge the autumn her husband died and has lain on the warm bricks ever since, too heavy to fly and too proud to ask for help.

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You bring a bucket of Discovery apples, because that is what your grandmother brought the lame hen, and because nobody else in the village will go near the wall. The horns are chipped at the tips. Its orange eyes open slowly and settle on the bucket before they settle on you. "You are late," it says, in a voice like a drawer pulled out of a damp dresser. "The sun has been on my back since noon."

You tip the apples onto the grass and it eats them without hurry, crunching each one and spitting the cores into the nettles. When it is done it lifts one clawed hand and points up the slope, to the highest row of trees where the ground is still bare. You climb onto its shoulder, hold the spiked ridge of its neck, and feel the wings open with a sound like a sheet shaken out over a line.

From the top the orchard is a green loop laid across the valley, every tree a small dark scale and the fallen fruit a scatter of coins. The dragon does not look down at it. It looks at the ridge, and then at you, and says that next summer you will bring a ladder.