Black dotwork and geometric dragonfly tattoo with stippled wings and a long thin body on the upper arm of a woman in a knit cardigan.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric dragonfly on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly built from a symmetrical angular body and stippled, fan-like wings in black ink, with a long single line extending downward from the body. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on bare skin below a sleeve, with the subject's dark top and cream knit cardigan framing it. The composition is a close crop centred on the arm, with the design sitting horizontally across the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Dragonfly Wing Line Insect

Find an artist for this

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

Nobody in Holme Fen trusted a level that had not first been checked against a dragonfly, and Amos Pell would tell you so before he told you his own name. For forty years he had walked the dyke lines with a brass theodolite that had belonged to his father, and for forty years the water had gone wherever it pleased, which was never where the drawings said. So when the big dark hawker came down the sluice channel that March morning and hung above his chain, he stopped and did not swat at it.

Keep reading

It settled on the staff, four wings spread flat as a pair of folded maps, its body a black diamond with a thread of tail hanging straight down to the reeds. Amos lined the sight-bar along that thread. The thread did not wander. Where it touched the water was true level, the ground beneath it was true, and every sluice gate the Commissioners had raised since 1851 sat a hand's breadth too high on the wrong side of the parish.

He wrote it in the ledger the way his father had taught him, with the insect drawn in the margin: a diamond, a fan of pinpricked dots for each wing, a line running off the foot of the page. Then he walked to the Commissioners' office in Ely and laid the book on the clerk's desk.

They laughed until the clerk fetched the great plan down from the press. The gates came out that summer, the water found its own road to the sea, and the fen went back to being the fen.