Black ink dragonfly tattoo with dotwork wing patterns and geometric triangles on the side of the ribs.

Dragonfly with geometric dotwork on ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly with patterned, ornamented wings is the central subject, drawn in black ink with a vertical line of small triangles and dots above and a stacked triangle motif below. The wings combine fine linework with dotwork shading and geometric fills, and the design is set against bare skin. The photograph shows the tattoo on the side of the torso, with a denim garment at the right edge of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Dragonfly Triangle Dot Geometric pattern Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrowgate Tower had been broken since Easter, so Ruth Okonedo carried her tin of ochre up fourteen flights and paused on every landing to let her heart settle. By the fourteenth the stairwell smelled of damp concrete and someone's frying onions. She had three walls to finish before the council inspector came on Friday, and the triangles on the north wall still needed their dots.

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The dragonfly came in through the open landing window while she was crouched over the skirting. It did not hover the way the pigeons did. It set down on the wet paint just above her brush, four wings flat and gleaming, and stayed there so long she forgot to breathe. Its wings were laced with pattern, diamonds inside diamonds, the kind of fine grid her grandmother used to stitch onto cushions in Lagos. Ruth took a pencil from behind her ear and began to count the cells on the nearest wing, one by one, on the back of an envelope.

Mr Pryce arrived at four with his clipboard and his drawings, and found her kneeling with the envelope in her lap. He tapped the approved sheet. One stacked triangle per storey, he said, one dot per flat, nothing freehand. She showed him the envelope. The cells repeated with no gap and no overlap, a grid that could be painted a hundred times without a mistake. He looked at it for a long time, then at the wall, then at the dragonfly, which had not moved. Leave the insect, he said at last, and I will call it a drawing error.

When the dragonfly finally lifted, it went out through the window and over the car park, and Ruth returned to the wall with the paint still wet. Where it had sat there was a small dark dot exactly one storey below the summit of the stacked triangles. The council repainted the stairwell twice in the years after. Nobody has ever touched that dot.