Black line drawing of a dragonfly tattoo design with tribal-style wings and a column of three red hearts forming its body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly with heart-shaped body design

Mixed · Flash

A black outline drawing of a dragonfly with wings decorated with bold, curving tribal-style shapes and inner heart motifs. The body is a vertical column of three red hearts, decreasing in size, ending in a long thin tail, with a pair of fine antennae at the top. The design is shown on a plain white background, with solid black areas contrasting against the single red accent colour.

Dragonfly Heart Wing Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the harbour town of Skerrow the nets were mended by women, and the men went out before the light. Old Maud Penhallow kept a lantern on the sea wall for the boats that were late, and she had kept it lit for eleven winters since her son Tom rowed out into the fog and did not come back. The harbourmaster told her the sea keeps what it takes. Maud told him to mind his own lamp.

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Each evening a dragonfly came to that lantern. It was black-winged, its wings cut through with curling shapes like the lace on the chapel window, and down its body hung three red hearts, the largest nearest the head and the smallest near the tail, which ended in a thread of a point. The gulls laughed at her for talking to it. The fishermen said dragonflies did not cross salt water. Maud only set out a saucer of milk and waited.

One night in October a storm came in off the Teeth, and nine boats were still beyond the bar. The dragonfly rose from the lantern and flew out over the breakers, its red hearts bright as coals in the spray. The men in the channel saw it and turned their bows toward it. Maud lit every lamp along the wall, and the little creature wheeled above the harbour mouth until the last keel scraped the slip.

In the morning there was no dragonfly on the lantern. Maud walked the wet stones to the end of the wall and found Tom's oar, the one he had carved his name into, lying in the weed. Beside it was a single red bead of glass, smooth from the tide. She put it in her apron pocket and went home to wash the saucer.