Black and grey ornamental dragonfly tattoo with patterned wings and swirling filigree, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly with swirls across the upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragonfly with detailed, veined wings sits across the upper back, with its body extending downwards. Curling scrollwork and dotted ornamental motifs surround the insect and trail beneath it. The tattoo uses fine outlines and soft grey shading, set against lightly tanned skin in a close, centred composition.

Back Dragonfly Wing Swirl Filigree Ornament Scrollwork Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the fleet's one unwritten rule before you learn to splice: never net a dragonfly. Old Tamsin at the slipway says they are the only things on the water that know where the herring have gone, and a boat that takes one comes home empty for a month. You laugh at her, at nineteen, with tar on your hands and the Morwenna Rose riding low beneath you.

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The season turns grey. You are mending the drift nets on the quay when a dragonfly lands on the cork line, wings spread wide like the scrollwork on the chandler's gate, its long body dropping into a dark curl of tail. You hold very still. Its wings catch the light the way the lace on the widow's shawl does, the veins as fine as hairline cracks in a plate.

That night the fleet goes out into a flat calm and the nets come up silver and empty. Eleven boats, nothing. You are last in, sitting on the gunwale, when an insect comes skating over the water towards your lamp and circles the bow. You don't reach for the dipper. You watch it turn three slow loops, scattering the dark with its little dots of light, before it lifts away east towards the sound.

Next morning the herring are breaking the surface off the Ness, so thick the gulls can't find a place to land. Tamsin looks at you over her tea and says nothing at all, which from her is a medal. You cast where the dragonfly went.