Black line drawing of a winged dragon with curling smoke above its head, in a bold tribal-style outline, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Winged dragon with smoke curls design

Black and grey · Flash

A coiled dragon with outstretched wings rests on a long, looping tail, with three curling wisps of smoke rising from its snout at the upper left. The design uses bold, tapered black outlines with minimal interior detail, and the wing membranes are shown as open spaces framed by sweeping strokes. The drawing is entirely black on white, with no shading or colour.

Dragon Wing Smoke Tail Scale

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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 off the headland the winter the salt pans froze, and nobody in Porthgarrow believed it until Mabyn Tregear went out to fetch the goats and found its tail wrapped twice round the lighthouse rail like a mooring rope. It was not big, my grandmother used to say, not as the drovers' tales made them, only the length of a fishing smack and the colour of wet slate. Its wings were held open like the ribs of an umbrella that had been left out in weather, and when it breathed out, three slow curls of smoke went up over the harbour wall and hung there, twisting, as if somebody had written a message on the air and forgotten to finish it.

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The harbourmaster wanted it shot. The vicar wanted it prayed over. Mabyn wanted only to know why it kept looking at the lamp room door. So she climbed the iron stair with a bowl of pilchards and sat on the top step, and the dragon lowered its long narrow head and watched her eat her own bread and cheese, quite patient, quite curious, the way a cat watches a clock.

It was the lamp-keeper's widower who had left the light unlit that winter, and the dragon had been keeping it burning in the only way it knew, breathing warm smoke over the glass so the salt would not crust the lens. Nobody had asked it to. Nobody had thanked it either. When the spring tides came, Mabyn lit the wick herself, and the three curls rose from the gallery and drifted out over the water, and the boats coming home that night saw the light and steered by it. The dragon was gone by morning. The lamp was never cold again.