Black ink line drawing of a stylised dragonfly with large looped wings and a curling swirl tail on a white background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Dragonfly line design with swirling tail

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a stylised dragonfly with four rounded, teardrop-shaped wings drawn in bold black outline and two small curled antennae. Its slender body tapers into a long, flowing tail that ends in a tight spiral, with a few small dots along the wing edges. The image is rendered in black ink on white paper with no shading or colour.

Dragonfly Wing Swirl Spiral Antennae Line art

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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

Mrs Pargeter had been told the dragonfly would not last the week, so she left the back door propped open and let it come and go as it pleased. It came in off the yard on the third afternoon of the heatwave, zigzagging over the cruet and a stack of unclaimed Post Office circulars, and settled on the brass rail of the hall stand as though it had booked the room.

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Her lodger, Mr Abernethy, a schoolmaster from Leeds who took his breakfast at the same window seat every morning, said dragonflies were always lost when they wandered this far from the reed beds. They wanted slow water, he said, and somewhere to hold their wings out of the wind. Mrs Pargeter said that was what everyone said about lodgers too, and went back to polishing the glass in the front door, where the sea made a grey stripe above the rooftops.

The insect did not leave. It stayed on the rail through supper and the clatter of the Mitchells arguing over the bathroom, its four wings held flat like a folded letter, its long tail hanging toward the carpet and curling at the end as tight as the spring of a clock. On the Friday, Mr Abernethy carried a jam jar up the stairs with a card over the top, and came down without it, looking sheepish, to say only that the creature had found the sill of his room and seemed content enough there.

Mrs Pargeter found it on the Sunday morning, drying in the sun on the outside step, and thought about the lodgers who had come and gone over thirty summers. She did not put it in the bin. She left the back door wide open for the rest of the season, and when the first autumn gales came in off the water, she still left the latch off, in case.