Black line drawing of an ornate dragonfly with patterned wings and a segmented body, shown as a tattoo flash design on a white background.

Ornamental dragonfly line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical dragonfly drawn in black line work, with curled antennae, a patterned head and a long segmented abdomen ending in a pointed tip. The wings are filled with intricate scrollwork, dotted rows, teardrop cells and mandala-like detail. The image is monochrome, with no shading, set against a plain white background.

Geometric Dragonfly Insect Wing Mandala Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down and mind the crisp packet, because this is the one about the boy and the dragonfly on the stairwell of Brindle House. The lift had been broken since Easter, the council had written three times to say Thursday, and Tariq was carrying his nan's bread up nine flights when the landing window swung open on its own and something came in on the wind like a folded letter.

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It was a dragonfly, and far too big for a stairwell, long as his hand from its curled horns to the point of its tail. Its wings were gone over with scrolls and rows of tiny dots, teardrop cells strung along the edges, as if someone had patiently inked a whole garden onto glass. It settled on the handrail, folded its wings flat and looked at him the way Nan looked at a shop-bought sausage roll, with great patience and no forgiveness. Tariq said, 'You're lost,' and the dragonfly turned its patterned head towards the window, as if it had heard the question before and was tired of answering.

So he followed it down, one landing at a time, the loaf tucked under his arm going soft at the corners. Nine floors below, it circled the painted bins twice, slow, the way a teacher walks the aisle before a test. By the time he reached the car park it was perched on the bike rack with its wings open, catching the sun through every cell, and nobody else in the whole block seemed to have noticed a thing.

Nan was waiting at the ground floor window, which was against all sense since she had sworn off stairs years back. She took the bread and said her own mother had seen the very same insect over the canal in 1961 and walked straight into the water after it. Tariq asked if it had come back for her. She laughed, and the dragonfly lifted over the roof like a stitch pulled out of cloth, and to this day we are all still waiting for the lift.