Colour tattoo of a dragonfly with pale lilac and blue wings and a purple and green body, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Dragonfly tattoo on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly is shown in profile with translucent wings in pale lilac, blue and pink, and a purple and green body outlined in dark ink. The tattoo sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, and the skin around it looks red and irritated. The background is out of focus, and the subject's face is not shown.

Back Dragonfly Insect Wing

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They drained the pond behind Heron Court in the wet spring the lifts were finally mended, and the men with the digger did not look up. Only the dragonfly looked. It hung over the cracked concrete where the water had been, its wings like two panes of frosted glass, and it would not go away.

Keep reading

It went up the tower instead. The people of Heron Court said afterwards that it tried every flat on the way, tapping the windows with its tail. The Pattersons on four said they had no water to spare. The boy on seven said it was only a fly. At the top, on thirteen, old Mrs Hale kept a washing-up bowl on her balcony with a sprig of mint standing in it, because her husband had liked mint and she had never found a reason to move it.

The dragonfly settled on the rail beside the bowl and did not fly off. Mrs Hale filled the bowl each morning and the dragonfly drank from the rim, its body the colour of a bruised plum and green as the mint. It stayed through the summer. In August the stems were thick with eggs, and the bowl hummed with the small wet business of it.

When the frost came the dragonfly was gone, and Mrs Hale carried the bowl inside and set it on the windowsill. Some years later a girl from the flat below knocked to ask whether there was still a pond up there. Mrs Hale told her to look properly. Between the mint leaves, in the cold clear water, something was waiting for spring.