Colourful dragonfly tattoo with red, orange and purple wings and black swirl linework on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful dragonfly with swirls on the back

Back · Colour · Photo

A stylised dragonfly fills the centre of the image, with a slender dark body and wings shaded in red, orange and purple. Black scrolling swirls and tendrils surround the insect, with a tail that tapers into a red point. The photograph is taken close up on bare skin, with the design centred in the frame and colour ink dominating.

Back Dragonfly Swirl Wing Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

...and so the lamplighter's daughter went down to the canal steps with a jar of bramble wine and no coat, because nobody in Thornbury Lock had ever told her that the dragonflies only come out for those who've stopped waiting. Hush now. I'll tell it slow, the way my mother told it to me under the bridge.

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The swirls you see curling round the insect, those are the currents of the old weir, black water winding back on itself. Every bend of it was a question the girl hadn't asked her father. Where did the lamplighter go when the gas was switched off? Why did the lock-keeper's boy never come back up from the basin? The dragonfly listened to all of it, folding and unfolding its wings of copper and plum, and it said nothing, because dragonflies have no mouths for lies.

On the third night the girl stopped asking and started rowing. The red point at the end of its tail was a lamp, small as a fingernail, and it lit the way across the flat water to the place where the boy had gone under. She found his cap snagged on a sluice gate. She found the lamplighter's ladder too, rotted and sunk beside it, and understood that her father had never left at all; he had simply climbed down and stayed.

So if you pass the lock tonight and see a shimmer over the water, don't reach for it. Just say good evening, the way she did, and keep walking home. Right, who wants the last of the bramble wine?