Fine line black dragonfly tattoo with detailed mesh-like wings on the upper back, with a small Roman numeral VI below its long tail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink dragonfly with finely drawn, mesh-like wings and a slender body and long tail sits centred on the upper back. The linework is thin and even, with the wing veins drawn in dense detail and little or no shading. A small Roman numeral VI sits beneath the tail, and a thin necklace is visible at the top of the frame against plain skin.

Fine line Back Dragonfly Wing Insect Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Ashgrove House has been stuck between the fourth and sixth floors since March, and you are the one who has to sit beside it with the caretaker's torch and a flask of tea gone cold. Mrs Okafor on six has rung the desk twice about the damp. Outside the wire-mesh window on the stairwell, a dragonfly the size of a thumb has been knocking against the glass for an hour, its wings catching the sodium light like the netting on a fishing boat.

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You find the stairwell door propped open with a brick, and beyond it the shaft smells of oil and rain. The dragonfly has got in. It rides the draught upward past the cables and lands on the brass plate by the sixth-floor gate, where someone scratched a VI into the metal years ago. You crouch and watch its wings settle, every vein drawn as neatly as a net mender's knot. Your nan used to say dragonflies were the devil's needles, and you believed her until you were nine.

Mrs Okafor appears at the grille with a tea towel over her shoulder and asks whether you intend to sleep down there. You tell her the insect has a better sense of direction than the council. She laughs, then says her husband used to hold the lift door open for these things when they came in from the car park, because he said a house with no visitors was only a box. The dragonfly lifts off, follows the cable up into the dark, and a moment later the mechanism groans and the car drops into place with a sound like a held breath let go.

By August the lift works again, but you still take the stairs to six. Each time you pass the brass plate you stop and check the VI is still there, as if something small might be waiting on the landing to be let out.