Black linework flash design of a dragonfly with outstretched wings, surrounded by grey stars and ending in a looping swirl tail, with no body placement shown.

Dragonfly with stars and a swirling tail

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

A line drawing of a dragonfly with four outstretched wings, veined with fine lines and tipped with solid black marks. Its long segmented body trails into a thin curling line that ends in a spiral, with a circle behind the insect and small grey stars scattered around it. The artwork is in black ink on white, with the stars shaded in flat grey and no body part visible.

Fine line Dragonfly Star Circle Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodgers at Sandpiper House were not supposed to fly anything from the roof, but Mr Lusk had done it all August regardless. He was a retired clockmaker from Leeds with a bad knee and a box of paper and cane, and each evening after tea he carried his kite up the back stairs like a man carrying a sleeping cat. My mother said the wind would have it into the harbour one day. I said nothing, because I had been given the job of holding the reel.

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The kite was a dragonfly, long-bodied and stiff, with four wings of waxed paper veined in ink so fine they showed only when the light came low. He had pasted a grey card circle behind its head and scattered stars cut from old ledger sheets across the sky around it. "Something to steer by," he said, when I asked. The tail was the clever part. He had knotted a hundred feet of linen thread to its end and let it fall in loops, and at the bottom he tied a curl of tin foil that flashed when the sun went down.

On the last night of the month the wind swung east and the thread snapped at the reel. I watched the dragonfly go out over the marsh, tilting, its tail unspooling behind it like smoke. Mr Lusk stood at the parapet with his hands in his cardigan pockets and did not reach out. "Let it go, Peggy," he said. "It has been waiting all summer to be somewhere else."

Next morning the kite was not on the marsh. I found it at dawn on the weathervane above the laundry, the paper wings flattened against the chimney and the thread wound round and round the iron cockerel in a tight spiral. Mr Lusk came up with his knee bandaged and his tea going cold in his hand. He looked at it for a long time, then said we would leave it there.