Black ornamental dragonfly tattoo with swirling patterns across the wings, placed on a person's upper back over the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate dragonfly on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A dragonfly tattoo with intricate swirl and scroll patterns filling the wings and an elongated, ornamented body that runs down the centre of the back. The linework is bold and the wings are solid black with negative-space detailing, with no colour ink. The photograph is taken close up in low light against a dark background, with the tattoo placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Blackwork Back Dragonfly Wing Swirl Ornament Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent of the Morrow Travelling Show came down in the rain outside Ledbury, and nobody bothered to take the lions. They had gone grey in their cages years before, and the old tamer, Ansel Crewe, had decided that a lion nobody paid to see was just a large cat with opinions. So he opened the gates and let them walk off across the stubble toward the hills.

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The girl who swept the sawdust was called Wren, and she had a jar with a dragonfly in it. She had caught it at the river the summer before, a bronze-bodied thing with wings like lace held up to a window, and she kept it because nobody had ever told her she couldn't. When the wagons split at the crossroads, she carried the jar in her apron pocket and asked the wind which way the water ran.

The wind said nothing useful, so she followed the hedge until she came to a mill with a wheel that had stopped. Inside, an old miller was carving scrolls into a wooden lintel, curling and doubling each line back on itself. He looked at the jar and laughed. "Dragonflies don't carry themselves home," he said. "They carry whatever they were sent to find."

Wren opened the jar at the millrace. The insect rose, circled once, then went low over the water and drew a long dark line down the surface, the way a pen runs down a page. Where it touched, the ripples folded themselves into spirals and stayed there, and the lions, somewhere far off, lifted their heads and turned toward the sound of the river.