Coloured drawing of a dragonfly with patterned wings perched on a pink flower with a green stem, drawn as a botanical tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly and pink flower design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a dragonfly with patterned wings resting on a pink flower with a yellow centre and a long green stem. The outlines are bold and dark, and the wings are filled with blue and pink decorative marks. The design sits centred on a plain white background.

Botanical Dragonfly Flower Wing Stem Pink flower Insect

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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 lock-keeper's daughter at Hollin Weir had a habit of climbing onto the roof of the narrowboat Patience whenever her father went below to argue with the paraffin stove. From up there she could see the whole cut, the reeds bending under the wind off the water meadows, and the pink knapweed that grew in a tangle along the towpath where nobody bothered to cut it back.

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One July a dragonfly came down out of the alders and settled on a knapweed head just beyond the bow. It was the blue of a gas flame, and its wings held patterns like frost on a window, swirls and small bright dots that caught the light and threw it back. The girl, whose name was Nell, lay flat and watched it for an hour. When a barge came through and the wash rocked the flower, the dragonfly did not fly. It only tilted its wings to the sun and waited for the water to settle.

Her father, when he came up at dusk, found her still there and asked what she was doing. She said she was keeping the insect company, because someone had to. He laughed and told her dragonflies were hunters, that they ate midges by the hundred and cared nothing for flowers. She thought about that for a while. Then she carried a jam jar down the bank, very slowly, and when the dragonfly lifted and crossed the cut toward the alders, she went back to the boat and found the boat's logbook and wrote in it that the flower had kept its patience and so had the fly, and that nobody had been sorry for it.