Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly mandala with three dragonflies

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a circular mandala made of dragonfly wings radiating from a central flower, with dotwork stippling in the petals. Three separate dragonflies sit to the upper right, drawn in fine clean outlines with solid black bodies. The image is monochrome, and the design is centred on a pale patch of skin with the mandala filling the lower left of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Other Dragonfly Mandala Flower Wing Insect

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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

Dear Nell, the rose window came out of its lead this morning, all forty-one pieces of it laid across the trestle in the chapter house like a hand of cards nobody wants to play. You asked whether the dragonflies were real or only the saint's fancy. They are real. Every summer they come up off the mere below Hartlow Abbey and hover in the broken tracery as if the glass were still there to hold them. Brother Owen used to say they were souls waiting for permission. I say they are just hungry for the midges.

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The centre is the difficult part. Someone in the fourteen hundreds set a flower in the middle, its petals cut so fine that the light through them throws little dots across the flagstones, and around it runs a ring of wings, each one a shade bluer than the last. Three of the wings are missing entirely. I have been painting the lost ones from the stone itself, not from the old drawings, because the drawings were made by a man who had never seen a dragonfly close enough to count its veins.

Yesterday one landed on my sleeve while I was matching a blue. It sat there, perfectly still, while I held the offcut up against its wing. Then it lifted through the hole in the north light and out over the ruin, and I thought, well, that is the colour, and I went back to the lead. Love, Hanna