Two photographs of a dragonfly tattoo with black outlines and blue and purple wings, one larger on a forearm and one smaller on an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly tattoos on forearm and ankle

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The image shows two photographs of the same dragonfly motif, one larger on the forearm and one smaller on the ankle. Each dragonfly has a bold black outline, a slender body and wings filled with blue and purple tones. The left photograph is closer and shows the wing shading more clearly, while the right shows the smaller piece against plain skin.

Forearm Ankle Dragonfly Wing Insect

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lantern, it has singed more than one fool's eyebrows. The marsh at Holm Reach was split in two by black water, and on the near bank lived Ada the reed-cutter, while across it, under the willows, lived the salt-trader Piers Ormond, who had stolen her father's boat and never once said sorry for it. Neither would cross the water to ask. So the dragonfly went instead.

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Every morning that summer a blue-and-violet dragonfly came skimming over the reeds with a word tucked under its wings. Ada would tell it 'bread' or 'rain' or 'you owe me a boat', and the creature would carry it across, its wings catching the light like cut glass, and bring back whatever Piers had to say. The words grew short. Then they grew kind. By autumn the messages were only a single shape each, a wing folded twice, because neither of them could say the thing aloud.

The old men say the dragonfly wore out its wings in the end. Ada found it one frost morning on her doorstep, its black body stiff, its wings still holding that purple shade. Under it, folded small, was a scrap of paper that said only: come over, the water is shallow at the ford.

She went. The water was shallow. Some things, my friends, need only a little wind to carry them, and a go-between that flies long enough teaches the people it serves how to walk on their own.