Black line drawing flash sheet of four dragonflies in varied positions, each with a dashed swirling trail, shown without any body placement.

Four dragonflies with dashed flight trails

Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows four dragonflies at different sizes and angles, drawn in dark outline with wing veins and segmented bodies. Dashed swirl lines trail behind several of them, suggesting movement across the page. The drawing is in black ink on a white background, with the larger central dragonfly dominating the composition.

Dragonfly Insect Wing Flight Swirl

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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

Sit closer, the fire's only low because your grandad feeds it wet slack and it won't catch. Right. You want the dragonflies, not the snow. Snow's easy, it falls on everybody. Dragonflies don't wait for anybody.

Keep reading

The winter Hollin Bank pond froze to the bottom, and old Mrs Pennock was still scattering crusts for ducks that had gone off somewhere warmer. Then in the second week of February four dragonflies came over the top field, low and stuttering, one as big as a child's hand and three no bigger than a clover head. Tom Ashby, who had hired on that autumn and thought he knew everything, swore they were flakes of frost that had lost their nerve. He said so loud enough for the whole yard to hear.

But they didn't fall. They wheeled above the ice, and where they'd been, their tails hung in the air, dashed and curling, as if someone had traced their route with a loose pen and left it for her to read. Mrs Pennock put her boots on and followed the loops across the field, past the gate, past the dead elder, down to the one black hole in the ice where the spring still breathed. The big one settled on the reeds there, wings flat as a closed letter, and waited.

She stood a long while in her coat. Then she went home and told nobody but the kettle. Some things only come out in the cold, she said, when they've been waiting all summer for someone to notice the trail.