Black fine line dragonfly tattoo with two parallel bands on a woman's forearm, with a small lotus outline on her chest above a black bra.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly and bands on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black dragonfly with detailed, delicate wings sits on the inner forearm, with a thin single line extending from its body along the arm. Two parallel black bands run across the forearm nearer the wrist. The ink is solid black with fine outlines and fine detailing in the wings, and a small dark lotus outline is visible on the chest.

Fine line Forearm Chest Dragonfly Wing Line Band Lotus

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the coal dust on the step. My grandmother had this from her grandmother, and she swore it happened on the Tuesday the Nine Foot seam flooded, so it is true enough for a Tuesday.

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Dai Pritchard was sixteen and had been put on the pony lines because his hands were small enough to reach under the cage gates. Every afternoon he walked the tramway to the old washery pond, where the dragonflies rose out of the reeds like threads of smoke. He caught one with a horsehair noose and tied its body to a length of cotton, one end looped round his wrist, so it could fly out over the water and come back when he tugged. He said it was the only thing in the valley that did as it was told and never coughed.

Then the second bang came, and the men came up with no lamps, and the pony stable folded in on itself. Dai was in the yard with the dragonfly still on its thread. He did not go down. He stood where the wind could take the insect and watched it pull at the cotton, leaning out towards the black mouth of the drift, and he understood that it wanted the water more than it wanted him. So he let the line run through his fingers, two turns round the wrist and then none.

They found the dragonfly the next week, drying on the chapel lintel with its wings gone the colour of old slate. Dai was never found at all. But the thread was still tied to the chapel gate, and it has never once come untied, and if you pass at dusk you will see it, two dark bands and a thin line running out into the air, as if somebody is still holding on.