Black outline drawing of a dragonfly with segmented body and striped wings, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a dragonfly seen from above, with its long segmented abdomen angled to the upper left and four wings spread out. The wings are drawn with double outlines and inner vein lines, while the body is shaded with simple banded lines. The image is a single-colour design on a plain white background with no shading or colour fill.

Dragonfly Insect Wing Outline

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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 band has already packed its trumpets into velvet cases, and the caretaker is stacking chairs with a sigh you can hear from the stage, but you are still holding your shoes in one hand while the last waltz comes out of the gramophone in the corner, thin and bent by the old horn. Somebody has left the lamps on above the sprung floor. They throw the pattern of the room up into the rafters, so the crack in the mirror ball looks like a fanned wing.

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Eddie Marsh from the lamp room asks whether you will take one more turn before the doors are bolted. You tell him your feet have given up, and he tells you the dragonfly has not. It has been circling the chandelier since eight, a long dark thing with its tail angled up and to the left like a pencil someone forgot to lift, and its four wings are edged twice in black, the outer line and the inner, so that when it turns the light goes through them in stripes. Nobody has managed to catch it. The usher tried with a programme and gave up.

You take Eddie's hand because the record is nearly finished and because it seems rude to refuse a dance with a man who has been polishing that chandelier for thirty years. Halfway round the floor the dragonfly drops from the lamps and settles on the brass rail of the bandstand, its wings spread flat as a pressed leaf. It does not fly off. Eddie stops. You stop. The needle lifts with a hiss, and the room goes quiet enough to hear the sea through the cracked fanlight.

You walk over slowly, the way you would approach a bride's train, and when you reach the rail the insect lifts once and goes out through the open doors into the sodium light of the car park, where it becomes one more moth among the men locking up their vans. Eddie says they only come in when someone is about to leave. You put your shoes back on, which hurts, and do not tell him you had no intention of leaving until it did.