Realistic grey dragonfly tattoo with blue-violet accents on the inner forearm, near the wrist.

Dragonfly on an inner forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dragonfly is tattooed on the inner forearm, shown from a slight angle with its wings spread and its tail curving up to the left. The body and wings are rendered with soft grey shading and fine vein detail, while the banded abdomen, head and short trailing antennae are picked out in blue-violet. The design sits diagonally across the forearm against a plain, lightly lit background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hear the generator cough before you see the lights, and by the time the Waltzer's first car is bolted down you have already counted the dragonflies over the mud. There are always a few at the back of the fair, where the water butt sits beside the cattle pens, skimming the green skin of the puddles as if they were paid to.

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Your uncle Dev told you the blue ones were the ride men's luck. Not the grey ones with wings like smoked glass, but the narrow blue-violet fellows with banded tails who rode in on the lorries and never once got rained out. You didn't believe him. You believed the rain, which came sideways over Boston on the third night and took the hook-a-duck tank down to a foot of brown water.

On the fourth evening, with the rides dark and the tarpaulins sagging, you find one perched on the lever of the chair-o-plane, wings held out flat like a folded map. It doesn't move when you pull the cloth off the seats. It only turns its head, a pale knot of eyes, and waits, the way the old carousel horse waited for the coins to drop.

You tell nobody. You clean the brass, you oil the chain, and when you lock the caravan you leave the door open a crack. In the morning the tail is curled up against the frost on the window, and it has not gone, and neither, you decide, will you.

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