Black ink drawing of a dragonfly with daisy-like flowers and swirling scrollwork, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly and flowers design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A dragonfly with detailed, patterned wings sits among three flowers with layered petals and curling scrollwork. The linework is fine and black, with stippled dots and intricate filled patterns across the wings and body. The design is monochrome on a white background and fills a tall, roughly rectangular composition.

Botanical Dotwork Dragonfly Flower Daisy Swirl Wing Scrollwork Dot

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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

The barge Mabel Quill has been moored at Ashby Lock since the frost, and you are the only one aboard who knows how to coax the stove. Every morning the dragonfly comes to the rail, a bronze needle with wings like stained glass, and you tell yourself it is only some insect sense that brings it back to the warm tin of the chimney.

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Uncle Ned swore the dragonfly was the drowned lockkeeper's daughter, come back to see whether the paint had dried on the roses he'd daubed across the cabin doors. He was drunk when he said it, and you were eleven and believed him anyway. Now the roses have faded to pink smudges, and the three daisies curling up the lintel have lost their hard black edges to the damp.

In March the water rose over the towpath. You untied the mooring rope with numb fingers while the current hauled the hull like a dog on a lead, and the dragonfly went ahead of you down the cut, skimming the foam in loops, stopping every few yards as if to wait. You followed it past the broken weir to the sluice where the old boats were stacked, and there, half under a tarpaulin, was a chest with your uncle's initials burned into the lid.

Inside was his logbook, dry as a ship's biscuit, and a last line in soft pencil: keep the wings open for her. You lifted the lid of the stove, fed it the last of the coal, and left the cabin door propped wide to the water.