Colour fine line tattoo of a dragonfly with patterned blue, green and orange wings and purple vine swirls on a lower leg.

Patterned dragonfly with swirls on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with a slim black body and ornate wings filled with dots, scrolls and small daisy motifs in blue, green, orange and teal. Thin black linework outlines the body and wings, with purple and blue vine scrolls and green dotted accents trailing from the wings and tail. The design is centred on the lower leg, with the foot visible at the lower right of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Calf Dragonfly Wing Swirl Vine Daisy Dot Scroll Flower

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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

You pull onto the gravel shoulder of Route 9 because the faded sign on the water tower says RIVER MILE 4, and the river has been dry since your grandmother was a girl. The heat rises off the tarmac in sheets. Your tyres tick as the engine cools, and past the cattle grid a windmill turns with a grind you feel in your back teeth.

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You walk down into the wash. The cracked mud lies in plates like old crockery, and in the middle of it sits a flat grey stone with a dragonfly drying its wings on top. It is not a dragonfly you have seen before. Its body is a string of black beads, and its wings are painted like a fairground carousel, blue and teal and orange, dotted with pale daisies that look stitched in with a very fine needle. A thread of purple leaves trails from one wingtip and wraps a creosote bush as if someone had tied it there on purpose.

Old Ignacio at the petrol station used to tell you that dragonflies rise out of the water to die in the heat, and that the painted ones had struck a bargain with the river. You laughed at him then. You are not laughing now, because the insect lifts off the stone, circles your head twice, and settles on the back of your hand with the weight of a folded letter.

It stays there while the windmill turns and a lorry grinds past on the road above. When it finally lifts, it heads east, towards the water tower, and the green dots it leaves behind on your knuckle do not wash off in the truck's cold tap water. You drive on with the windows down, and the mile markers count backwards, one by one, until the river comes back to you.