Black and grey fine line dragonfly tattoo with shaded wings, sitting on the forearm.

Dragonfly on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly with outstretched wings and a long, slender body, drawn in fine black linework. The wings are lightly shaded in grey with veining picked out in dark lines, and the body has segmented detail. The design is centred on pale skin against a dark grey background.

Fine line Forearm Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell had counted dragonflies on the Broads for thirty-one summers, and the ledger in her coat pocket had gone soft at the corners from the reed damp. Every morning she walked the staithe at Hickling with a pencil stub behind her ear and wrote down what came off the water: a banded demoiselle, two brown hawkers, a single emperor high over the sedge. The county recorder had written twice asking her to stop, saying the numbers were too neat, but Ada knew the difference between a count and a guess.

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The man from the Norwich paper came in July with a camera and a notebook of his own. He wanted the story of the old woman who knew every insect by its flight, and he asked whether he could buy the ledger for the archive. He offered more than her boat was worth. Ada told him the pages were not for sale, and that the archive could have her when someone was willing to walk the staithe in the frost, when the planks were slick and the light came up grey over Catfield.

Then the dragonflies rose in a single shimmering cloud, and one slid down past his shoulder and settled on the open page, its long body straight as a pin, wings held out flat like a cross. Ada did not reach for the pencil straight away. She let it sit there, the way the young ones always had, until the sun moved off the water and it lifted away toward the reeds, and only then did she mark the tally.