Small painterly dragonfly tattoo with teal wings and a green body hovering above teal water ripples, on bare skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly over water ripples

Colour · Photo

A small dragonfly with translucent blue and teal wings and a green body rests on the tip of a thin stem above a set of concentric ripples. Loose splashes and droplets of teal and green ink spread around the wings and water. The image is a close crop of plain skin, with the tattoo in the upper left corner and the rest of the frame empty.

Dragonfly Water Wing Splash Droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis the night porter said the blue flies knew the way to a ward before anyone rang for help. He said it every July, leaning on his trolley by the lift, and Agnes Corrie never told him he was daft, because her mother had said the same about the wagtails on the farm outside Carlisle.

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That night the window above the car park was open an inch for the heat, and a dragonfly came in over the sill as if it had been asked. It was green along the back, with wings like cellophane dipped in the pond. It settled on the rim of a cold mug of tea at the nurses' station and stayed very still, and Agnes knew without looking that the pool by the bins had gone to rings.

She went to the glass. Below, the water had opened into circles, one after another, pushed out from a single point and spreading to the edge. Dennis's rule was simple: count the rings and you count the hours left before someone is sent for. She counted. Four. Five. At six her bleep went off, and bed nine was asking for her. The old man in it had been breathing quietly all evening, and now his daughter was on the stairs with her coat still open.

Agnes sat with them until the window grey came up over the bins. Then she lifted the sash as high as it would go. The dragonfly lifted off the mug, crossed the car park in one long stitch of light, and dropped back to the pond. By the time the day shift came in, the water below was flat as a plate.