Black and grey geometric dragonfly tattoo with faceted wings on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric dragonfly on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly built from angular, faceted wing panels and a segmented body, drawn in bold black outlines. Grey shading fills some of the wing sections, while the body and tail use darker solid tones. The tattoo sits centrally on the side of the ribs against a plain skin tone, with a dark fabric draped at the left edge and a blurred background on the right.

Geometric Ribs Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lead came from Hollis's yard in Spalding in grey coils that smelled of vinegar and old pennies, and I had until Thursday to cut the panel for Mrs Bratt's landing window. She wanted a dragonfly. Not a bird, not a rose, a dragonfly, because her husband had caught one on the mere the summer before he drowned, and she said it had looked at him as if it knew his name. I told her I could draw it in facets, straight lines only, the way old Mr Quennell taught me. He never once let a curve into a panel he had made.

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I drew it on brown paper at the kitchen table with a steel rule. Four wings, each split into panels like a cut diamond, and a body of segments narrowing to a tail. Every line had to meet another at an angle a man could check with a square. My daughter Joan sat opposite, shelling peas into a colander, and asked why it had to be so hard. I said a thing built from straight lines stays where you put it. She said that was the most sensible thing I had ever said about anything, and she was twelve.

I cut the pieces at dusk, when the light came flat across the bench, and soldered them in the order the drawing gave. The black outlines went on last, the lead thick and dull, and where I had washed the wing panels with grey the glass caught the lamp in a way I had not expected. On Thursday Mrs Bratt stood beneath it with her hand on the rail and said nothing for so long I began packing my tools.

Then the casement lifted and a real dragonfly came in off the mere, blue and quick, and settled on the lowest bar of the lead, exactly where the body met the tail. It stayed there while she counted to a hundred, as if it had checked the angles and found them true.