Loose, sketchy purple and magenta dragonfly tattoo on the top of a foot, with splashes of colour around the wings and body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly on the top of a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly drawn in loose, sketchy purple linework, with pink and magenta wash-like splashes around the wings and body. The design is shown across the top of a bare foot, with the toes visible at the lower right against a white towel. The composition is centred on the tattoo, which has a painterly, unfinished feel.

Other Dragonfly Insect Wing Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Ruddock had lost the dragonfly twice before the kettle boiled. It hovered over the reed bed at Hollin Mere, hung still in the thick August air, then shivered sideways and was gone before her brush touched the paper. She sat on an upturned bucket with the board across her knees and told herself that was the trouble with insects. They did not sit for portraits.

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Her grandson Rafe came down the bank with two cans of ginger beer and found her squinting at a smear of violet. 'It looks like a bruise with ambitions,' he said, and sat beside her, which she counted as a kindness. She had spent a week trying to paint the thing from memory, and the memory kept changing. Wings like rain on glass, one pair longer than the other, a body that was more intention than anatomy.

So she stopped trying to be exact. She loaded the brush with magenta from the old pan Edie had given her in 1979 and dropped it into the wet wash, letting it bloom into a pink cloud. Then she drew the wings in one fast violet stroke, lifting the brush before the line could think about it. Rafe watched without speaking. The dragonfly on the page had no hard edges, only the sense of having just been there.

When the paper dried, the real one had gone for good, but the painted one stayed put. Mabel signed the corner, wrote the date beneath it, and propped the board in the sun to finish. Rafe took it home to his own kitchen, where it hangs above the fridge, and most mornings he tells her it looks a little more like the day they saw it.