Fine line black tattoo of a dragonfly with curling swirls on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly with swirls on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A thin, single-line dragonfly with two wings on each side sits on the upper back, with its body trailing downwards. Curling swirl lines extend from the wings and the tail, and the tattoo is rendered in faint grey linework with little or no shading. The photograph is taken close up in black and white, with the shoulder edge visible at the top right.

Fine line Back Dragonfly Swirl Wing

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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

Mrs Pargeter had kept the boarding house on Gull Terrace for thirty years, and in all that time nobody had asked her about the blue-green thing that lived in the scullery window. It was a dragonfly, or it looked like one, though it was no bigger than a thumbnail and it never flew when anyone was watching. It only moved at dusk, when the tide was out and the mud shone like pewter, and then it went round the cracked pane in long loops, trailing silver lines that faded before they touched the sill.

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The first lodger to notice was a clerk named Tobias Finch, who had come down from Leeds with a bad chest and a worse temper. He sat with his tea one evening and watched it for an hour without speaking. Then he said the thing was writing, and Mrs Pargeter told him to mind his own cup. But the next morning there was a loop of pale line on the windowsill, fine as a hair, and Tobias swore it spelled his mother's name. She had been dead eleven years, and nobody in the house had told him so.

Mrs Pargeter gave him the spare room at the top of the stairs and asked nothing more. Each dusk after that the dragonfly came back and drew, and each morning Tobias copied the lines onto paper, squinting until his eyes watered. By the end of the summer he had a letter that began Dear Mother and ended with the tide coming in over the groynes.

He posted it from the end of the pier. When the reply came, two weeks later, it was in his own handwriting, and it was dated the day before he was born.