Dragon (European) Tattoo Meaning
Heroic triumph, guarded treasure, conquered obstacles, and might.
In the West the dragon is the adversary. It sleeps on hoarded gold, demands tribute and sacrifice, and lays waste to kingdoms until a hero rises to face it — and the hero is defined by that facing. The dragon is the largest obstacle imaginable, which is exactly why slaying one makes a saint or a king. And yet at the edge of Europe the same fearsome creature was claimed as a banner, flown by a whole nation with pride.
The Greek dragon is the guardian of what must not be reached. Ladon, the hundred-headed serpent-dragon, coiled around the tree of golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides and never slept — and fetching those apples past him was one of Heracles' twelve labors. To get the treasure, the hero had to get past the dragon.
At Delphi, the great serpent-dragon Python guarded the sacred spot at the center of the world until the young god Apollo killed it with his arrows and took the oracle for himself — the priestess there was forever after called the Pythia in the dragon's memory. The Greek dragon marks the threshold of the forbidden and the sacred: the thing you must defeat to claim the prize, the price of admission to the treasure and the truth.
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