Black ink drawing of a dotwork-edged insect with delicate wings and a scrolled dagger, sketched on textured paper with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Insect and ornate dagger design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a stylised insect with fine-lined, lace-like wings edged with small dots, set above an ornate dagger with scrolled, curling ornamentation along its blade. The linework is fine and even, with no shading or colour, and the design runs diagonally across a torn sheet of cream paper.

Fine line Dotwork Insect Dagger Scrollwork Wing Dot

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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

The rain has been coming sideways across Chapel Row since seven, and the awning over your trestle has given up pretending. You are folding lace tablecloths into a crate when the old man from the cutlery stall shoulders through the crowd, a carrier bag dripping at his knee. He sets it on your table without a word. Inside, wrapped in a torn sheet of cream paper, is a dagger with a blade as thin as a pencil line, its length furled with scrollwork like smoke that forgot to leave.

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'Pawned by a woman who said it belonged to a dragonfly,' he says. 'Her words, not mine.' You laugh, then stop, because the insect at the hilt is drawn so finely that its wings look wet. Each wing is veined like a leaf held up to a lamp, and along the edges someone has set tiny dots, a beading of rain. You tilt the sheet and the light catches it. It is only ink, you tell yourself, but the antennae seem to tremble whenever the wind pushes under the tarpaulin.

You offer him four pounds. He refuses, taps the paper and says the dagger goes to whoever can stand still long enough to read its spine. So you do. Rain drums on the canvas, a child argues about bananas, and the scrolls keep curling. Somewhere past the sixth minute the flourishes resolve into a name you do not know, and the insect lifts its head.

When you look up the old man has gone, and the stall beside you is a bare plank with a puddle on it. You wrap the blade again, carefully, and find the paper torn in a new place, a clean edge where nothing was before. Keep it dry, you think. Something that wants to fly will always find the weather.