Back view of a fine line black dragonfly tattoo with cross-hatched wings, sitting centrally between the shoulder blades on a person in a navy vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly is drawn in slender black linework, with its body running vertically down the centre of the upper back. The wings are outlined and filled with fine cross-hatching that shows the veining, with a slightly denser shade on the lower wings. The ink is dark grey-black on pale skin, against a plain grey background and a navy top.

Fine line Back Dragonfly Wing Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragonflies came up out of the old drift the week the roof began to talk. Nobody in Cwm Gallt had seen one so far under the hill, and Evan Price, who had hewed coal for thirty years, said a dragonfly wanted open water and sun, so if one was down here then water had found its way in. He said it to the lamp room, and the lamp room said nothing back.

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It was the Pryce boy who saw where the insect went. Tomas was eleven and small enough to fit the gaps between the timbers, and he followed a thread of blue-black creature along the east road, past the props, past the stacked tubs, to a place where the dust hung still and the dripping stopped. The dragonfly hovered there with its wings held flat, the veins netted fine as a fishing line, and would not move on. Tomas put his palm to the rock and felt nothing cold.

"Here," he called, and his voice came back to him wrong, as if the hill were repeating it slowly. The men came with picks and rope. They cut a little way and found the seam dry, and beyond it a passage that breathed. Evan went in first, and when he came out his face was black and his eyes were wet from the air. He said the old workings had been sealed for a reason, and that the water would have come through there by morning.

They counted heads at the cage. Forty-one, and every one came up. Tomas looked for the dragonfly, but the lamp had burned down and there was only the smell of wet stone. Nessa Price hung the lamp back on its nail and left the door open a crack, in case anything still wanted to find its way out.