Four small black dragonfly tattoos in a vertical line down the back of a person's neck, decreasing in size towards the shoulders.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four dragonflies down the back of the neck

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with dark hair tied up, showing four solid black dragonfly silhouettes stacked vertically down the centre of the neck, each smaller than the one above. The dragonflies have simple, bold shapes with wings spread, and the ink is crisp against pale skin. The plain white top and soft blurred background keep the focus on the tattoos.

Blackwork Neck Dragonfly Insect Silhouette Neck Column

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the wherry Marigold had a rule about dragonflies, and the rule was that you did not kill them in the galley. Mrs Ada Pell kept a jug of cold water by the range for the ones that came in through the hatch after summer rains, and she tipped them out over the side with a flick of her wet cloth. Nobody on the river asked her why. They had all eaten her eel pie.

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The winter her husband Tom went down with the lighter below Harrow Staithe, she kept the rule anyway. She would stand at the bow with flour on her hands and count what came back to the reeds. The first year there was one dragonfly that sat on the tiller every morning. The second year there were two. By the third there were four, one large and three that grew smaller the further they flew, lined up along the rail like children waiting for a ferry.

Ada said they were Tom, and his mother, and her own mother, and the boy they lost to fever at the staithe. The men laughed, and then they stopped laughing, because the four of them never once landed on anything but the same brass rail, always in the same order, biggest first, the smallest at the back where the wind came off the marshes.

When Ada grew too old to stand the bow, the crew carried her up to the reed beds on a summer evening. The dragonflies came off the water in a line and passed over her chair, one after another, the smallest last. It turned once above the tiller as though it had been asked to count itself, then followed the others into the reeds.