Colour tattoo of a dragonfly with blue and green swirl-patterned wings and black scrollwork, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragonfly with swirls on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with blue and green wings patterned with swirls, a teal body and thin black antennae sits on skin near the upper back. Black linework forms curling flourishes and tendrils around the insect, and the wing swirls are filled in with flat colour. The composition is centred on the dragonfly, with the scrollwork extending down and to the left of the frame.

Back Dragonfly Wing Swirl Scrollwork Flourish Antennae

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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

Now sit closer, because the lamps on Harrow Street only last until the second bell, and the story of Mags Teasdale's glass-winged clock is longer than the oil. She kept a repair stall under the railway arches, mending anything with a spring in it, and the whole street brought her their broken things. One October a boy came in with a tin dragonfly that had belonged to his drowned uncle, its wings cracked across like old ice on the canal. Mags did not ask how the uncle drowned. She only turned the thing over and said, these wings want paint, not wire.

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She mixed the colours that night from what the sign-writers left in their jars: a green like pond weed in the sun, a blue like the sky over the gasworks before rain. Then she painted swirls into each wing, slow curls that she said were the stories the canal kept and would not tell. The boy watched her brush go round and round until the sun came up grey over the chimneys. Her hand never shook once, though the arches creaked all around her.

When the boy came back for it the next morning, the dragonfly was not on the bench. The stall was empty but for a black thread of ink running out under the door, curling down the cobbles toward the water, lazy as smoke. Some nights, if you walk the towpath with your collar up, you can still see a little blue flash skimming the surface ahead of you, and the boy, grown, swears it stops to wait for him at the lock.