Fine line dragonfly tattoo with teal wings and black scrolling swirls on the top of a foot, with pebbles beside it.

Dragonfly and swirls on a foot

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A small dragonfly-style insect sits on the upper foot, with its wings outlined in teal and its body drawn in thin black linework. Black curls and scrolls extend above and below the insect, and the design is set against smooth skin with a pebbled background at the right edge. Most of the ink is black, with the teal limited to the wings, so the colour is mixed.

Fine line Other Dragonfly Insect Swirl Scroll Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are fourteen the summer the fair comes back to the gravel pit outside Hollin Bridge, and you are sent to fetch paint from the wagon nobody else will open. Old Tobias Frane keeps his brushes in a biscuit tin that smells of linseed and cloves. He has painted every gondola on the Waltzer for thirty years, and he will not let anyone touch the scrolls on the last one.

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"Hold the lamp steady," he says, and you do, while he dips a sable in a jam jar of teal and lays the wings of a dragonfly onto the panel. Black for the body, one thin line drawn with his breath held. Then the curls, unwinding off the wood like smoke from a fire that has gone out. "Insects are the hardest," he says. "Everything they are lives in the edge."

The fair packs up on the Sunday. Tobias goes into hospital on the Monday, and the Waltzer rolls off towards Carlisle without him. Months later you find the gondola in a lorry park, stripped to grey primer by someone who had a job to do. Only the scrolls are left on the door of the cab, faint under the rain, as if the paint had decided to stay put.

So you take the cracked-lid jar from his tin and, on your mother's back step, draw a dragonfly no bigger than your thumb. Black line first, wings last. You let the teal run a little past the edge, the way he never would have, and you leave the curls unfinished so the last loop trails off the paper into the grass.