Close-up photo of a small blue and teal dragonfly tattoo with outlined translucent wings on pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue dragonfly tattoo on pale skin

Colour · Photo

A dragonfly in flight is shown with two pairs of wings spread above and below a slender teal body. The wings have soft shading and fine vein detail, and the body is filled with light teal. The image is a close, slightly soft photo against a pale skin background with a dark area at the right edge.

Dragonfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind you keep still, because the next bit is the part the mate never believed. We were nine weeks out of Valparaiso with the water casks gone green and the wind dead, and on the forty-first morning a dragonfly came down out of a clear sky and settled on the mainyard. Not a gull, not a moth. A dragonfly, long as my little finger, with a body the colour of a kingfisher's back and wings held out like someone had pinned them to the air.

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Cook Tobias Vane wanted it in the pot. Old Maud Penhallow, who had sailed with her father on the salt run out of Falmouth, told him to leave the creature be. She said they only come where there is water, and if one has crossed a whole ocean to find us, then there must be water ahead, or else the sea itself has something to show us. Tobias laughed and called her soft in the head. But he left the bird alone, and every hour it lifted off, circled the foremast three times, and came back to the same spar, as patient as a lamplighter.

On the forty-third day, a little after the dog watch, it lifted and flew straight off the bow, thin wings catching the last of the light. We followed it into the dusk, and at first grey light the lookout's cry came down the deck like a bell: reeds, a line of green, and a river mouth opening its arms to us. The casks were filled that same morning, and nobody aboard ever called Maud soft again.