Colour realism tattoo of a blue and teal dragonfly with pink-tipped eyes, placed on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue dragonfly tattoo on skin

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with outstretched transparent wings is tattooed on skin. The insect has shaded blue, teal and green wings with fine dark outlines and vein lines, plus pink and green accents on the head and wing tips. Soft grey shadowing under the body gives it a raised, three-dimensional look against the plain skin tone.

Realism Other Dragonfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobiah, The dragonflies came down the Saltmere causeway again this morning, thick as thrown silver, and I thought of you at once. Mother says they are only hunting midges, but I watched them for an hour from the sluice gate and I am certain they are reading the water. Every one of them lands on a reed tip and tilts its head, first left, then right, as though checking a letter for mistakes.

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The old reed-cutter at Brackwen told me the wings are made of glass that the Queen's glassmakers have never managed to copy. Thin as breath, veined in blue and green, they catch the light so that a dragonfly over the mere looks like a shard of sky that has lost its way. He says that if you hold one still on your palm long enough, its eyes turn the pink of the evening lamps in the high towers, and that is how you know it has decided to trust you.

I tried it on Wednesday. I held one on my wrist for the length of the Angelus bell and nothing happened, except that my arm went numb and the bell rang wrong. Then, just as I was about to shake it off, it flew straight at my face and hovered there, close enough that I saw the small red gold of its head, and it stayed until the light went. I have decided it was carrying something. I have decided it was carrying you.

So I am sending this one with the next tide. If it reaches the towers, look for a blue wing caught in the ironwork of the north window, and write to me about it. Tell me what you have been making. Your loving sister, Ilse.