Four solid black dragonfly silhouettes in a horizontal row on a white background, shown as a tattoo stencil design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four dragonflies in a row

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows four solid black dragonflies of varying sizes and angles, arranged in a loose line from left to right. Each insect has a slender body, two pairs of wings and a trailing tail that tapers into a dotted line. The design is flat black ink on white with no shading, gradient or colour.

Dragonfly Insect Silhouette Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water tank at Sallow Well had been dry since the spring, so when the dragonflies rose off the cracked mud you nearly stood on the brake for them. Four of them, lifting one after another from nothing, as if the heat had folded them out of the air. You pulled onto the verge and let the engine tick. Out here nobody would argue with you about stopping. The road ran straight to a horizon with no one on it, and the last car had passed an hour ago, leaving its dust to drift slowly over the bonnet.

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The woman at the petrol station in Harrow Cross had told you they came from the Dunmere marshes, a hundred miles north, and that they never strayed far from water. You had laughed and paid for your coffee. Now the four of them drifted ahead across the tarmac in a loose, uneven line, one pair wide and one pair tight, their slender bodies black against the bleached sky. You put the car into second and followed them, because it was easier than deciding not to.

Their tails trailed behind them as thin dotted lines, like something drawn in pencil and then half rubbed out. Eleven miles on, past the fence posts and the rusted sign for a town that no longer existed, the line broke apart at a cutting in the rock. Three of them kept going south. The fourth dropped toward a single wire strung between two posts, where water had beaded along the strand and a green smear of reeds clung to the ground. You had not planned to stop anywhere until dark.

You climbed out and crouched by the wire. The water was cold on your fingers, and when you looked up the dragonfly was resting on the top strand, wings flat as cut paper. Behind you the road ran back toward the tank, and the dust of your own tyres had laid four faint dotted lines across the tarmac where the shadows had crossed it. By the time you turned round, the wind had smoothed them away.