Colour tattoo of a red dragonfly above green vines, leaves and blue stars across the top of a foot, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly and vine tattoo on a foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A red and black dragonfly sits above a flowing green vine with curling tendrils and two green leaves. Small blue star shapes are scattered along the vine, and the thin linework is clean with little shading. The design runs diagonally across the top of the foot, with the dragonfly placed in the upper right of the composition.

Botanical Fine line Other Dragonfly Vine Leaves Star Swirl

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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

Mind the net, it'll have your ankle if you stand still. Aye, sit there where the tar smell is. Now, the Brannock girl, the one who ran the ice house at Skerry Quay, came down to the slip one August with a coil of green rope over her shoulder and no shoes on her feet. She said she'd not go out with the fleet that year unless someone showed her how to tie a sheet bend properly. Nobody gave her a week.

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She learned quick, mind, quicker than the lads who'd been born on the water. That summer there were dragonflies off the harbour wall, red and black as a boiled lobster, which is no colour for a fly. They sat on the mooring buoys in the mornings and the old men said they were the drowned coming up to look at the weather. The girl said they were only hungry. She'd feed them bits of bread from her pocket and talk to them like they were cousins.

Then came the October blow, and the fog came in behind it so thick you couldn't see your own bow. The Wren had gone out with the girl aboard and the boy from the chandlery, and by dusk there was no light on her at all. Old Tam Fenwick stood on the wall with a lamp in each hand and swore he'd seen blue stars sitting low on the water where no stars ought to be. Then a red flicker came in over the breakwater, and the girl followed it. She'd hung strands of green weed from every buoy line she passed that summer, curling them round the cleats so the trail showed pale in the murk, and she ran that trail home like a thread through a needle.

So when you see a dragonfly settle on a rope, don't swat it. Take your cap off to it, the way Tam did every blessed morning until he died.