Two people seen from behind, each with a small black dragonfly tattoo behind the ear, one with a hand resting on her neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching dragonfly tattoos behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Two people are photographed from behind, each with a small black dragonfly tattoo on the skin just behind the ear. The dragonflies are simple, solid silhouettes with fine detail in the wings and body, shown in black ink only. The warm-toned background is softly blurred, with framed pictures on a wall, and one person's hand rests on the other's neck.

Fine line Neck Dragonfly Insect Ear Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Lean in, the lamp is going and the guards have gone for their tea. This is the story of the Vell river, which runs under two flags and has never once agreed to sit still between them.

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On the east bank lived Marta, and on the west bank her sister Ilse, and between them stood a customs hut with a painted sign that read NO CROSSING WITHOUT STAMP. Their father had quarrelled with the ferryman over a goat, so the sisters were forbidden to meet. But dragonflies do not queue at hatches. Every morning Marta folded a word no larger than a fingernail, tied it to a reed with thread pulled from her hem, and waited for the dark-bodied ones to carry it over. Ilse answered the same way. Nobody checked what flew through the air.

The winter the river froze, the dragonflies stopped. Marta waited at the reeds until her fingers went white, and the only thing that came across was a single insect stiff with frost, its wings still holding the shape of the thread. Tobiasz, the young guard, found it on the ice and carried it to the hut himself. He could not read her script, so he walked it across the grey river, the first man to cross in a month, and set it down on Ilse's step.

Ilse unfolded the paper. It said only: the reeds are still standing, come when they fall. Marta did not come that year. But in spring the dragonflies returned in their hundreds, and on the first warm morning two of them landed on the same reed, wings touching, and nobody on either bank could say which one had been sent.