Black ink practice sheet on white paper showing step-by-step line drawings of dragonflies, flowers, paisley motifs and star designs, with handwritten encouragement to practise.

Henna-style practice sheet of dragonflies, flowers and

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn practice sheet laid out in numbered steps, with dragonflies built up over three stages at the top and flower and paisley motifs below. The designs use fine black outlines, dots and curled swirls, with some paisley shapes filled with scalloped edges and small stars. The sheet is plain black ink on a pale background, and handwritten instructions run around the edges.

Botanical Dragonfly Flower Paisley Star Swirl Dot Mandala

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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 yourself down on that upturned bucket, and mind the bean canes, they bite. You want the one about Mrs Oddie and the little finger? Well. Every morning that summer she sat at the potting bench at the bottom of the garden with a jam jar of Indian ink and a sheet of cartridge paper, and she drew the same dragonfly until her hand knew it better than her own name. A line for the body, a teardrop for the tail, two more teardrops for the wings, quick as you like. Rest your pinky on the paper, she'd tell the hedge, to nobody in particular. Steady the hand and the wings will come.

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Her nephew Dennis, home from the navy with nothing to do, wandered down one wet afternoon and laughed at the wings. 'They look like sweets,' he said. So she handed him the pen. He drew a dragonfly so heavy it sank straight through the paper. She didn't scold. She put a dot at its head, a curl on each wing, and said, 'Now you've given it somewhere to look.' After that they did flowers, five petals and a dot at the centre, then paisley, the teardrop with its hooked head, filled with scallops like lace on a christening gown and a small star tucked inside.

Dennis went back to sea in the spring and never sat at the bench again. Mrs Oddie pinned the sheet to the shed wall with four drawing pins and, every week, added one more flower, practising, she said, for when he came home to be shown. The dragonflies grew fussier each season, curls on curls, until the wings looked like they'd been stitched from smoke.

Last August a letter came with a foreign stamp. Inside was a single drawing, in a heavy, careful hand, of a dragonfly that was almost sitting still. She carried it down to the shed, pinned it beside her own, and stood a long while with the kettle going cold in the house. Then she took the pen off the bench and started on a new flower, because the wings always come if you keep your hand steady.