Black single-line drawing of a dragonfly design with two pairs of looped wings, small dots at the body and a long curling tail on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a simple black line drawing of a dragonfly with two pairs of looped wings, a small dotted body and two thin antennae. The linework is a single even weight with no shading. The plain white background is the only other element, and the drawing is composed centrally with the tail sweeping down to the lower left.

Dragonfly Insect Wing Line drawing Design

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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

Brother Anselm had warned me the ink would not sit on the new vellum, and I had ignored him, as novices do. When the first stroke skated off and left a hair-thin tail trailing towards the corner of the page, I swore under my breath and reached for the pumice.

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Then I stopped. The line had a shape I had not planned. It swept down and to the left like a fishing cord dropped into still water, and I found I wanted something to answer it. I drew two long loops above, then two shorter ones below, the way the dragonflies over the millpond held themselves above the reeds in July. Four dots for a body. Two antennae, curling off as though listening.

Abbot Gerard passed the carrel at the end of Sext and stood behind me longer than was comfortable. He said nothing for a while. Then he asked whether the creature was meant as a prayer or a mistake. I said I had not decided. He tapped the page once with a knuckle, the way he tapped the table when a brother's accounts did not add up, and walked on down the cloister.

The pumice stayed on its nail that evening. In the morning I found the drawing propped against the lectern, a pinch of sand on one corner to keep it flat, and beneath it, in the Abbot's cramped hand, a single word: Keep. I kept it. The tail still points to the lower corner, as if the thing means to dip itself in the ink and rise with something new.