Black line drawing of an ornamental dragonfly with paisley-style patterned wings and curled antennae, shown as a flash design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental dragonfly design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised dragonfly drawn in black ink on a white background, with a body made of a long, tapering spiral and curled antennae at the top. The wings are filled with dense paisley-like scrolls, dots and small loops, creating a symmetrical, ornamental pattern. The design is monochrome and centred on the page with no skin or body part shown.

Dragonfly Insect Paisley Swirl Scroll Dot Ornament

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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 ovens were already breathing when Mrs Okonedo came in through the back, shaking rain off a headscarf the colour of marigolds. I had the first tray of bloomers out and was dusting flour off my forearms with a tea towel, which was the only thing I had any control over at that hour.

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She didn't want bread. She wanted the old tin box from the top shelf above the proving drawer, the one with the lid that stuck, and she wanted me to open it in front of her. Inside were her late husband's pastry brushes and a folded sheet of tracing paper covered in ink. Dragonflies, dozens of them, each wing filled with little curled scrolls and dots, the way the tiles in her kitchen back home were painted. He had drawn them at the counter during the slow hours, she said, while I was still in short trousers and nobody had yet taught me to laminate dough.

I asked which one she wanted copied onto the window glass for the Saturday fair. She laughed and tapped the largest, the one whose body was a long tapering spiral running down the page like a loose ribbon. That one, she said, was the one he had got wrong on purpose, because a dragonfly that stays still is only a drawing, and he had wanted something that looked as if it might lift off the paper if you breathed on it.

We spent the next hour tracing it onto baking parchment with a pencil stub, the sun coming up grey behind the flour sacks. When I finally lifted the sheet, the spiral had come out a little crooked at the tail, just as his had. She said that was how she would know it was the right copy.