Black and grey fine line dragonfly tattoo with dotted shading on the wings, placed on the inner forearm.

Dragonfly on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly with outstretched wings and a long, thin abdomen sits on the forearm, with the head and thorax drawn as small dark shapes. The wings use fine single-needle linework for the veins, with stippled dotwork shading toward their outer edges. The tattoo is rendered in black ink on pale skin against a dark background, with a white sleeve visible at the top right.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Dragonfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had counted eleven dragonflies on the gallery rail before the tide turned, and by the time she lit the wick there were twenty, all of them facing the same way, into the wind that came up the Sound off the cold water. Nobody had told her dragonflies flew this late in the year. Her father had kept the light on Harrow Skerry for thirty-one years and never once mentioned them, so she took it as her own small discovery and wrote it in the logbook under the barometer reading, in the careful hand he had taught her.

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The lamp room was warm from the mantle, and the insects settled on the glass as if it were a pond. Their wings caught the beam and threw it out in thin grey stripes across the water, so the rocks below seemed to be ruled with pencil. Ada stood among them with her palm flat on the iron rail, as still as she could manage, waiting for one to land on her sleeve. None did. They went round the light in slow loops, each one pausing at the highest point of its circuit, and she thought they looked like men on watch who had been relieved and could not quite leave.

Her brother Tom came up the spiral stair at midnight with a flask of tea and a face full of news from the mainland. The ferry would not run again until spring. The letter from the Board was folded in his breast pocket, and he did not take it out. He only looked at the dragonflies, then at her, and said nothing about either.

At dawn the wind dropped and the insects were gone, all but one, which had folded itself onto the brass rim of the lens. Ada touched its long thin body with one fingertip. It did not move. She wrote the time in the logbook, then underneath it, in smaller letters, that the light had been kept.