Purple and pink dragonfly tattoo with black outlined swirls on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Dragonfly with swirling tails on upper back

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A dragonfly is shown with translucent purple and pink wings outlined in black, and a shaded black and purple abdomen. Black swirling tendrils extend from the wings and body across the skin. The design is centred on the upper back, with freckled skin visible around it.

Back Dragonfly Wing Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the dragonflies came back to the cut this week, the big blue ones and the violet-winged ones that Dad calls printed ghosts, and I have been sitting on the staithe every evening trying to draw them before they lift off. You would laugh. Mrs Pargeter says I have no patience, but the trouble is they never hold still long enough to be drawn properly, only long enough to be remembered wrong.

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Yesterday one landed on the tiller of the Marigold while Dad was mending the rudder, and it sat there with its wings held out flat like a pair of lilac window panes. Dad didn't move. He said his own father told him a dragonfly on the tiller means the wind will turn by morning, and sure enough the wind swung round to the north-east before supper and we had to haul the sails in early. I wrote the date on the back of the tide chart so you can check it against your own.

The curly bits are the part I can't get right. Out past the reeds the water makes loops where the current doubles back on itself, black in the shadow of the bank, and they curl away and reform like hair left to dry. I tried drawing them as a single line and it came out like a wire fence. Dad says that's because I'm trying to make the water stay still. Maybe that is the trick: the dragonfly is the only thing out there that knows where it's going, and everything else just trails behind it, swirling.

Come home at Michaelmas if you can. The boat needs a hand with the new sail and I've kept the blue tin of paint for you, the one with the purple you liked. Bring the drawing you did of the bridge at Hull, I want to see if your loops are better than mine. Your loving sister, Ada. P.S. The dragonfly is still on the tiller as I write this, so the wind may hold until Thursday.