Black and grey fine line dragonfly tattoo on the upper back of a woman with her hair pulled up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly tattoo on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small dragonfly with outstretched, sheer wings sits on the upper back, below the nape of the neck. The body and wings are drawn in fine, thin black linework with light shading in the wing panels. The photograph is black and white, with the subject's hair gathered up and a hand with dark nails resting in it at the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp will gutter before I reach the good part. You'll want to hear about Mabel Cotter and the summer the Broad dried up. No, don't look at the window, the sea's only a noise tonight.

Keep reading

Mabel kept the boarding house on the Yarmouth road before the war, and she had a lodger called Mr Ruddock who carved insects out of horn for a living. Little things, pins for ladies' hats. He'd sit by the back kitchen window with his tin of tools and a glass screwed to one eye, and the girl would bring him tea he never drank.

One August the marsh went still and the dragonflies rose off the reeds in their hundreds. He said their wings were the only honest glass in England, thin as a held breath, with the veins drawn on like a map of rivers nobody had walked. All summer he tried to cut a pair that fine from horn. Every pair snapped in the cutting, and he swept the pieces into a saucer and started again.

On the last evening he gave her a pin no longer than a finger. The wings were so fine you could read the tide table through them. She wore it low at the back of her neck to keep her hair up while she scrubbed the lodgers' floors, and nobody ever asked what it was, because it looked as though it had always been there.

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