Colour fine line tattoo on an upper arm showing a dragonfly, a bee, a dark bird and grass stems with red flowers, beside a framed print of the same design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Insects, bird and grasses on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A tattoo on the upper arm shows a dragonfly, a bee, a dark bird and tall grass stems with red flowers, with a small circular inset of a grain-like stalk and dashed guide lines leading to scattered botanical and insect motifs. The linework is fine and precise, with soft colour washes in yellow, green, red and blue. The right side of the image shows a framed print of the same design on pale paper, set against a plain wall.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Dragonfly Bee Bird Grass Flower Wheat Dashed line Insect Botanical

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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 hay was late that year, so Ada Sallow went out to the top meadow with a tin of pencils and a bad knee, meaning to draw what would be cut before anyone else saw it. She knelt where the sorrel met the couch grass and waited for things to come to her, which was how she had always worked. First came the dragonfly, pale as a window pane, hanging over the stems as if it had been told to keep watch. Then the bee, dusted yellow to the thighs, who landed on her wrist and walked up to her knuckle to ask what she thought she was doing.

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She told them both the truth: that she was copying them onto paper so the parish would know what grew there before the mowers came. The dragonfly said nothing, being mostly wings. The bee said the paper was ugly and the stalks were better left alone. A blackbird, dark as a coal scuttle, dropped onto the reed beside her ink pot and asked for the dashed lines, because a thing is not properly kept, it said, until you have shown where it goes.

So she drew the lines. Each one ran from a wing or a seed head to the edge of the sheet, and at the end of each she put something she had found in the grass: a rust-red bloom, a stalk of wheat with its grains still green, the crushed shell of a beetle, a seed that looked like a clock face. She worked until the light went amber and the mowers' lorry had come and gone up the lane.

In October the drawing was framed in pine and hung in the reading room over the bread oven, where the schoolchildren could look at it. Nobody asked about the bee. But the dashed lines were still there, running off the page toward the window, and on the first frosty morning someone found the dragonfly sitting on the sill, waiting, as if it had been sent to fetch her back.