Black ink line drawing of a dragonfly with swirling blackwork patterns filling its wings, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly with swirled wings

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A dragonfly is drawn front on, with its wings spread wide and filled with curling spiral and scroll patterns in solid black. The body is a slender chain of teardrop shapes ending in a point, with curled antennae at the head. The design uses bold black linework on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Dragonfly Wing Swirl Spiral Insect

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boatwoman Morwen Quill kept a dragonfly in a jar on the windowsill of the net loft at Porthgwidden, because the fishermen said a dragonfly that stayed past the herring season would bring the wrong weather. Nobody had ever seen it come or go. It sat on the cork with its wings folded like a pair of spoiled sails, and every morning she tipped a drop of brine onto the cloth for it.

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In the spring of the year the harbour master's boy went out with the Gull and did not come back, Morwen took the jar down and carried it to the end of the mole. The tide was making. She unscrewed the lid and held the glass out over the water, and the dragonfly did not move, so she shook it gently, and it rose in a sudden clatter of black lace, circled the lamp post twice, and went out over the bay with its tail dipping like a plumb line.

She watched it until it was a speck above the Mermaid Rock. Then a grey shape came up under the boats in the harbour mouth, a shape with a spiral of fins, and the water went quiet and bright along the channel. The boy was found the next morning, sitting on the Mermaid Rock with his boots off and his coat folded beside him, grinning like a fool and saying he had been shown the way home by a fat black dragonfly.

Morwen put the empty jar back on the sill. The windowsill smelled of salt and cut hemp, and she left the lid off so the air could get in.