Small fine line black tattoo of a dragonfly with detailed wings on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line dragonfly on the shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small dragonfly is tattooed on pale skin at the top of the back, near the shoulder blade. The wings and body are drawn with very fine black linework, with delicate vein detail and light shading that gives the wings some transparency. The tattoo sits in the upper left of the frame against plain skin, with a hand partly visible at the edge.

Fine line Shoulder Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, you, and let me finish the glazier's business before the bells go. The clock in Ostrenby's mill tower had stopped at a quarter past nine, and nobody in the kingdom of Hollin could see its workings without climbing the tower stair with a lamp in one hand and a pane of thin glass in the other. Tobin Wrenlow was the only glazier brave enough, or foolish enough, to go up.

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He found the trouble between the third and fourth teeth of the great wheel: a dragonfly, dead and dry, pressed flat as a pressed flower. Its wings had caught the light through the louvres every morning for a week, and so the wheel had stuck on its own shadow. Tobin lifted the body free with a bent pin. The wings were the strangest thing he had ever held. You could read the miller's handwriting through them, and the veins ran so fine that he could have counted them with his breath held.

He tried all winter to cast a wing in glass. Every one cracked in the annealing oven with a sound like a fingernail on a chin. It was Ilse, the miller's youngest, who told him he was going about it wrong. The wing wasn't glass, she said. It was water that had agreed to stand still. So he laid the dry wing on the pane, drew its veins in with a needle dipped in soot, and fired the glass just enough to hold the lines and no more.

When the clock was mended he hung the pane in the tower window. At noon the sun came through it and threw the shadow of a dragonfly across the square, a shadow thin as a breath, and the whole of Ostrenby stopped to look up at it. Some say the clock has kept better time since. I say it only keeps the hours the dragonfly lets it keep. Now go on home, the bells are ringing.