Colour tattoo of a blue and orange dragonfly above lavender, pink blooms and teal leaves in a soft watercolour style, on the outer leg below the knee.

Dragonfly and wildflowers on a leg

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with translucent wings sits at the top right of a sprig of lavender, two pink flowers and a pink bud, with teal and green leaves trailing down the leg. The linework is fine and the petals and wings are shaded softly, with washes of purple, teal, pink and orange bleeding into the background for a watercolour effect. The composition sweeps diagonally from the lower leg up toward the knee and thigh.

Botanical Calf Dragonfly Lavender Wildflower Flower Leaves Pink flower Bud Wing Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragonfly came down to the millpond every morning that July, and Mabel Crane swore it was the same one, because it always landed on the same reed by the sluice gate and waited for her to finish scrubbing the flour sacks. She was twelve and believed in nothing she could not wring out and hang on a line. Her father, who mended the wheel, said the creature was only hunting midges, and that a girl would do better to pick the lavender before the bees got drunk on it.

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So she picked it. She carried great armfuls up the lane to the cottage, where her aunt was boiling down the last of the pink campion for a salve. The bud on the stalk never opened, however long you watched it, and Aunt Jessamy said that was the way of the stubborn ones. Mabel laid the sprigs across the windowsill to dry, and the blue of them went grey, then purple, then the colour of a bruise going off.

On the last evening before the carrier came for her, she walked down to the pond with the wind behind her. The dragonfly lifted from its reed as she approached, hung in the air a moment with its wings catching the low sun like sheets of glass, and then it flew straight over the water and into the orange dusk. She stood with her wet hands at her sides and did not call it back. The bud, she realised, had never meant to open. It had only meant to wait for something to leave.