Black and grey dragonfly tattoo with ornate wings and a curving trail of dots across the upper arm and shoulder.

Dragonfly with dot trail on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey dragonfly with scrolled, patterned wings and thin antennae sits on the upper arm and shoulder. A curved trail of shaded dots, graduating in size, arcs around the design from the top of the shoulder down towards the arm. The shading is soft and smooth on a warm skin tone, with the composition centred on the dragonfly.

Fine line Shoulder Upper arm Dragonfly Dot Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the lift has been broken since Whitsun, so you'll climb the stairs the way everyone did before anybody got clever about lifts. Right, up we go. Fourteen floors of Coldharbour House, and at the top a roof with a water tank and a bath somebody dragged up in 1971 and never dragged back down. Old Mrs Adeyemi kept pond weed in that bath. Nobody was allowed to touch it.

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Every June the dragonflies came up off the reservoir three streets over, following the grey light of the estate as if it were a river. They hung above that bath in the heat, stitching the air with wings the colour of pencil smoke, lacy as a doily left out in the rain. Mrs Adeyemi would sit on an upturned crate and count them out loud. Dot after dot, she said, that's how this place is laid out: one thing leading to the next, all the way down to the car park where the boys kicked a tin can about.

The last summer before the council came to knock the block down, a lad from the fourth floor climbed up with a stolen pencil and asked her why the dragonflies never landed on the water. She told him they were waiting for someone to come and fetch them. He didn't believe her, so he sat on the tank wall all afternoon, drawing round the shadows the insects made on the tar, until his sketchbook had a curving trail of pale dots across it, each one a little bigger than the last.

The block came down in 1994. The reservoir is a car park now, and the bath is still up there under the sky, full of weed nobody is allowed to touch. When the dragonflies come in June they still hang over it, and if you stand very still at the edge of the roof you can see the dots they leave behind on the air, going out in a ring towards the river.