Black line drawing of an ornate dragonfly design with filigree swirls and gear details on its wings, with a key forming its body, shown without any skin or placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate dragonfly and key design

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a dragonfly whose body is a large key with a bow at the top and a bit at the bottom. The wings are filled with decorative scrolls, spirals and small cog-like circles, drawn in even, clean single-weight linework on a white background. The design is centred and symmetrical, with the wings spread wide and the key running vertically through the middle.

Dragonfly Key Gear Swirl Filigree Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The radiator had boiled dry forty miles past the last petrol sign, and I was flat on the sand under the pick-up with a torch clamped in my teeth when the dragonfly came down on the bumper. It was no bigger than my palm, its body a long brass key with a bow like a clover leaf, its wings cut from filigree that caught the sun like frost on a window. It clicked its head at me twice, the way a clerk checks a ledger, then lifted off towards the flats.

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I followed it because there was nothing else to follow. Heat rolled off the road in sheets, and every mile or so the dragonfly waited on a fence post, its little cog-circles turning slow in the wind, until I caught up. By the third post I could make out a tin-roofed shack and a gate hung with brass gears, each one stamped with a name I didn't know. The gate was padlocked. The dragonfly settled on the lock and held still, the way my grandmother used to wait for me to finish grace.

Inside was a workshop full of stopped clocks and a ledger where a man called Orrin Vell had written one line a day for forty years. The last entry read: Left the key with whoever comes back for it. I had come back for a radiator hose, and I said so out loud to nobody. The dragonfly lifted from the bench and hovered at my shoulder, patient as a bailiff.

I took the key from its body, which came away as easy as a pin from cloth, and the lock gave with a sound like a cough. The insect rose, wings ticking, and went off over the flats without looking back. I still have the key. It opens nothing I own, and I have tried them all. But when the engine runs hot now, I hear a tiny click somewhere under the bonnet, and I know which way to drive.