Back view of a woman with a dark bun, showing a bold dark blue dragonfly tattoo with swirled wing detail centred between her shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her dark hair tied up, sits on sand. A dragonfly tattoo sits centrally on her upper back, drawn in bold outlines with swirled detail within the wings and a segmented body. The ink appears dark blue or near black against her skin, and the plain sand background keeps the focus on the design.

Back Dragonfly Woman Hair bun Sand Beach Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyke had frozen at the edges again, so Maud Tebbutt went out before light with her eel spear over one shoulder and a lantern she did not bother to light, because the moon was enough on the reeds. Her brother Tom had walked this bank every morning for thirty years, and since the spring he had not walked it at all. The parish said the water had him. Maud said the water had only borrowed him, and that a borrowed thing came back when it was asked properly.

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She had been asking for three weeks. She had left bread crusts on the sluice gate, a twist of shag tobacco, and once the brass button from his good coat. Nothing came back but the cold and a heron that stood like a disapproving vicar. Then on the twenty-first morning a dragonfly lay on the gate, stiff with frost, its wings laced in dark blue lines that curled like the grain in old oak. Its body was ringed in segments, each one a small bead of ink. Maud had seen dragonflies all her life, but never one that had come out in January.

She lifted it with two fingers and it warmed slowly, the way a sleeper warms. Its wings loosened. It did not fly. It turned on her palm and walked toward the crook of her wrist, the way Tom used to shuffle up to the kitchen table when he smelled the bacon. "Well," she said to nobody. "You'll want a proper bed, then."

She carried it home inside her collar and set it in a jam jar on the sill, where the sun would find it first. By noon the jar was empty and the window stood open onto the fen. Maud did not cry about that. She put the kettle on for two cups, and when the second one had gone cold beside his chair she tipped it out on the step for the herons and went back to her nets.