Black and grey dragonfly tattoo with mandala-patterned wings and dotted circles, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly with mandala wings on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly with ornate, lace-like patterned wings spans the forearm, drawn in fine black linework with a row of dotted circles behind it. The shading is in soft greys, with a faint brown wash across parts of the wings and body. The dragonfly runs diagonally across the arm, with its long tail extending down towards the wrist.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Dragonfly Insect Wing Mandala Dot Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Penhale kept the galley of the Lark Dorothy for nineteen years and never once allowed a dragonfly aboard. They came off the fen reeds each summer and hung over the rigging, and she swept them from the hatch with a bristle broom, saying that a thing which skims water and eats the air has no business near a kitchen full of flour.

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Her boy Tobias, twelve years old and thin as a bread stick, had brought a box of lace bobbins from his mother's cottage and wound fan-shaped patterns on them while the kettle heated. He pinned each finished length to the bulkhead above the range, scalloped edges and small round holes like the eyes of needles. One March gale tore the whole row loose and flung it over the side, and a dragonfly as wide as a man's hand came down out of the spray and caught the lace up in its feet.

Ada went to the rail with the broom still in her fist. The creature hovered at the height of her face, its long tail dipping towards the sea, and she understood it wanted something. It had seen the dots Tobias pricked into the lace to guide his needle and taken them for a map. So she sat on a coil of rope and worked a fresh row by lamplight, ring after ring of small dots, and at dawn she handed it over the rail.

The dragonfly took the lace and the new dots and flew west towards the fen. The gale dropped. When the Lark Dorothy docked three days later, Tobias found the bulkhead bare except for one blue dot, no bigger than a pea, stuck where the first fan had been. Ada never swept another dragonfly off the hatch.