Black and grey fine line dragonfly tattoo with detailed wings on the inner forearm of a person wearing a red top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly with outstretched wings and a long thin body is tattooed on the inner forearm. The wings are shaded with fine hatched lines and the head and thorax show small detail. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey ink against light skin, with a dark background and a red sleeve at the top of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship had been becalmed for nineteen days when the dragonfly came aboard, riding a thread of air off the Azores that no one else could feel. Captain Hollis Varne watched it settle on the spanker boom and said nothing, because his mother had told him that a thing which cannot swim has come a long way to find you.

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The crew called her Mab, after the cook's wife, and fed her crumbs of ship's biscuit soaked in tar-water. She never ate them. She walked the rigging with her long black body held straight as a marlinspike, and at dawn she turned her wings east, fine as burnt paper, and the men agreed that was where the land must lie.

On the twenty-third day a boy named Piers, who had been sick since Madeira, climbed to the crosstrees to look for himself. He came down with his hands empty and his face bright, and said the sea beyond the bow was no longer flat but breathing, long slow swells rising from somewhere under the keel. By evening the sails filled. Nobody had seen the wind come.

The captain gave her the open window of his cabin when they tied up at Falmouth. In the morning she was gone. The log records only that the mainsail was set and every man lived. Hollis still keeps the frayed boom-rope she left coiled on his sill, and on still mornings he glances at the glass, though it has never once been touched by wings.