Full-colour painted drawing of a winged dragon with horns, glowing orange eyes and a scaled, coiled tail on a white background, offered as a tattoo design.

Winged dragon with coiled serpent tail

Colour · Flash

A single winged dragon is shown in profile, gripping with clawed hands and curling its long scaled tail into an S-shaped loop at the base. The linework is detailed, with shaded scales, membranous wing panels and highlights that give the body volume. The palette mixes deep blues and purples with amber, brown and teal-green tones, set against a plain white background.

Dragon Wing Scale Claw Horn Tail Fangs

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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

The dragon came down the scarp every October, when the fen mists were thick enough to hide its wings, and it coiled itself in the old well-house like a hawser left to rot. Brother Osric wanted it driven out with fire and holy water. Prior Gilbert wanted it fed. I wanted nothing, because I was the one who sat with the lamp at the foot of the stair and ruled the lines of the Psalter while the beast breathed through the floorboards.

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It came up the stair one night as I was pricking the leaves for Lauds. Its head filled the doorway, horned and sooty, its eyes the colour of the coals in the refectory hearth. I did not run. I watched its claws, pale at the tips where they had gripped the stone, and I thought of the saints who tamed beasts with a word. I had only ink. So I said, 'Do you want your name written down?' It breathed out smoke that smelled of cold iron and lowered its jaw onto my desk.

I wrote its name in the margin in gold leaf, the way a scribe marks a dedication, and then, because it kept nudging the page with its chin, I wrote the name of the valley beyond the Wolds where it said it had been born, a river the colour of its wings. At dawn Brother Osric found me with the lamp guttered and the dragon gone. Left on the vellum was a single scale, bronze at one edge and deep blue at the other.

The abbot had the leaf bound into the Psalter anyway, and it is still there. In the right light the scale shifts from amber to green. Every October the well-house is warm when we go down for oil, though nobody here has seen the beast since. Brother Osric swears he hears it sleeping under the flagstones. I tell him it is only the hot water pipes, and I keep the book open at that page.