Colour tattoo of a dragonfly with patterned green and yellow wings, framed by blue swirling scrolls on skin.

Dragonfly with blue swirls

Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with a black outlined body and wings filled with green, yellow and pale blue scroll patterns sits at the centre of the design. Thin blue swirls and curls wrap around the wings and rise above it, with a bolder blue spiral below. The colour is saturated against the reddish skin tone, and the composition is centred and vertical.

Dragonfly Swirl Scroll Wing Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth, the water has finally dropped below the second gate, so Tom has stopped swearing at the paddles and I can write properly. You will laugh, but there is a dragonfly who has taken up residence on the balance beam. Every morning she sits with her wings spread, green and gold where the sun catches the scrollwork, and every morning Tom tells her to shift before the boat comes through. She never does. She just turns her head to watch the water folding over itself below the lock, those little blue curls of current that chase round the pool before they drop away downstream.

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Tom says the lock was built to hold water still, and that is nonsense, because nothing on this cut has ever been still. The boats come and go, the rain comes down off the moor, and the eddy at the tail of the sluice never stops turning. I have started to think the dragonfly knows this. She can hover in one spot while the whole canal pushes past, and I envy her that, the trick of staying put while everything else moves.

Last Thursday a hire boat from Leeds jammed crosswise in the chamber, and I was the only one who could see the stern line caught on the cill. I climbed down with the boathook, cold to the elbows, and when I looked up the dragonfly had lifted off and was circling my head, close enough that I could hear the tick of her wings. Then she settled back on the beam as if she had done her bit.

Come up at Easter if you can. I will show you the spot. Bring your thick socks, the towpath is still mud. Your loving sister, Margaret.