Close photo of a small black tribal-style dragonfly tattoo on the lower back of a person wearing a white top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black dragonfly tattoo on the lower back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black dragonfly outline sits centre frame on bare skin, with swept, flame-like wings and a curled, scrolled head and thin body. The linework is bold and uniform with no shading, and the ink is entirely black. The tattoo is shown close up, with the body filling most of the frame and a white garment along the left edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had counted the arrow slits twice before the rain came, and the castle still had one more than the map admitted. Her brother Tam wanted to sleep in the gatehouse, where the roof held, but she kept walking the curtain wall with a tin lantern, looking for the dragonfly.

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Everyone in Carrick Hollow knew the story of the Dunmere lady, who had stitched black thread through her wedding veil and vanished the night the keep burned. Her swallows had nested in the cellars for two hundred years. Dragonflies, the old steward had told Mags, were the only creatures that could fly backwards, and so they were the only ones that could go back into a burning house and come out whole.

She found the mark at last on the east tower, carved above a doorway bricked up with lime. Someone had cut a dragonfly into the stone with a single unbroken line: a scrolled head, a thin body, wings swept back like flames. The chisel had been steady. Whoever made it had not hurried.

Tam came up behind her, complaining about the damp. She pressed her palm to the carving and felt the grain of the stone warm under the lantern. Behind the lime, faint as a held breath, something clicked, and the wall gave a little under her hand. "Hold the light," she said, and for the first time all night she was not afraid.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.