Colour realism tattoo of a dragonfly with purple wings and a blue body and tail, shaded to look three-dimensional, on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple and blue dragonfly on the side of the torso

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly is shown in flight with translucent purple wings, veined in fine dark lines, and a blue segmented body with a small blue head and thin legs. The wings and body are softly shaded with a grey drop shadow beneath, giving a three-dimensional effect. The colour is vivid and dominates the image against pale skin, with the subject placed diagonally across the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragonfly came in through the open roof vent of the tram depot just after the last service, and Ruth Abara watched it stitch the air between the sodium lamps as if it were measuring them. Its wings caught the orange light and gave it back lilac, the veins fine as cracks in a windscreen.

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She had spent three nights stripping paint from the brass rail of the number nine, and the solvent smell had got into her hair and her coat. The insect settled on the rail, its body bright as a welding flash, and she stopped scraping. Her father used to call them horse-stingers and swear they could not hurt anyone. She had believed him until a wasp got her at eleven and she cried for an hour over the wrong insect.

At half past one Dev came through with two teas in paper cups and found her sitting on the step with her knees drawn up. He asked nothing. She tipped her cup towards the rail, and the dragonfly lifted, circled the cold tram once, and slipped out through the vent into streets still wet from the rain, where the tarmac held the lamps like a row of small blue coins.

When the shift ended she did not finish the rail. She left a strip of the old green paint along its lower edge, where the light could find the brass underneath, and on the work sheet she wrote *left deliberately*. Dev read it over her shoulder and laughed, and the two of them walked out into a city that smelt of rain and diesel, as it had every night for years, and somehow it felt new.

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