Here is a reasonably clear image of a dragon from a runestone in Sweden (u177x). It is clearly snakelike. It depicts a mother dragon and her young. It is helpfully colorized. Mother is red. The young are shades of green and purple.
The runic artwork is stylized. The head of red mother is near the center. She bites her own tail. If you look closely, you can see her large white eye, her fang touching her lower jaw, and behind her eye is her horn that her neck partially hides. Her neck sweeps up and around down to her shoulder. Her arm is eaglelike with the talon functioning as a hand, but here the stylization makes the hand seem more like stiff fingers and a thumb pinching − a bit like a handpuppet. The rest of her is snake, whose red serpentine body sweeps from the shoulders around the runestone then backup thru the center where she bites it.
Look at the newborn snake, yellowish green at the farthest left. It lacks limbs and horns, and resembles a normal snake. It is a stylization of an adder, a venomous snake common in Nordic lands.
Going clockwise, the green snake is an adolescent who bites the mothers tail. Maturing, it has already shed its skin to reveal newly developed forelimbs, like the larger adult mother.
The rest of the young look like normal limbless snakes, like the yellowish green one.
Below is the only runestone (u887) that depicts a winged dragon that I am aware of. This flying dragon is colorized green. The red dragon looks like the red mother in the previous runestone. But note, both the green and red dragons here have tails that end in a prehensile handlike split tail.
Other runestones can be more ornate with many dragons slithering and weaving around each other, and bewildering to look at, or stylized beyond recognizable depiction. But generally, the dragons are either adults with horns and arms, or young that look like normal snakes, or somewhere in between.
Here is an image of a dragon from a stav church in Norway, dating to the 1100s. It depicts Fafnir, the dwarf who shapeshifted into a dragon. The human Sigurðr seeks to kill him. The dragon has the typical snakelike body. The head of the dragon is clearly lionlike. What looks like the tongue of the dragon is probably a stream of venom.
The neck sweeps upward from the head and off the top edge of the image. But just before it is out of view, see the arm, forearm, and handlike eagle talon.
This the
dreki, the Norse dragon. I normally refer to it in English as the Drekar, using the Norse plural form to serve in English as both singular and plural. So, one Drekar and many Drekar. (I dont think English speakers should need to know the grammatical forms of other languages.) Likewise, one Alfar and many Alfar. One Aesir and many Aesir.
