Black line drawing of an ornate dragonfly tattoo design with scrollwork above and dotted chains hanging from the wings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate dragonfly design with dotted chains

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed dragonfly drawn in black linework, with patterned wings, a jewel-like segment on the body and a decorative scrollwork motif above the head. Strings of fine dots hang from the lower wings, and the wing veins are shaded with small dotted accents. The design is shown in greyscale on a plain pale background.

Fine line Dotwork Dragonfly Wing Scrollwork Dot Chain Jewel 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

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the gooseberries. Sit on the wall where the stone's still warm. My grandfather's grandfather kept the walled garden at Hollin Park, back when the lake still had reeds in it, and he had a daughter called Ada who could not sit still for a minute. She ran barefoot through the rows of sweet peas, and the gardener's boy swore she was half dragonfly, because she never landed.

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One August the Lady of the house lost her mother's brooch, a silver dragonfly with a green glass eye, pinned to a dress one morning and gone by dinner. The steward searched the glasshouse and the stables. Ada searched the lily pond, wading in up to her knees, and came out with nothing but weed and a fat string of frogspawn draped round her wrist like a bracelet. She said the brooch was not in the water. She said it was up in the air, going round the pump house roof, and that she would show them.

They followed her out to the old iron gate, its scrollwork curls gone rusty at the tips. Ada climbed it quick as a thought and sat on the top bar to wait. Something flickered between the curls, and then there was a dragonfly, pale-winged, hanging in the sun as still as a stitch. Its body caught the light like a bead. When it lifted, a fine line of dew came off its tail in dots, like a chain of little pearls falling. And there, hooked on the topmost curl where the dragonfly had perched, swinging on its pin, was the brooch.

Ada never said how she knew it would be there. She only shrugged and said that if you ask a dragonfly where it has been, it will only shine at you.