Purple brush-stroke drawing of a dragonfly with spiralled wing tips and a long wavy trail, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple brush dragonfly with flowing tail

Colour · Flash

A dragonfly drawn in loose, expressive brush strokes, with four wings spread and a small spiral at the head. The body and wings use a deep violet ink with lighter lavender wash, and a thin, wavy line trails down from the abdomen. The composition is centred on a plain white background with the design sitting in the upper half and the tail sweeping towards the bottom.

Dragonfly Wing Brushstroke Spiral Trail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw came late that year, and the ice on the Harrow dyke stayed grey until March. Old Mabry Coyle kept the lower farm with her two sons and a lame grey mare, and when the first hard frost locked the water trough she went out each morning with a hammer and broke the skin of it for the beasts.

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One morning a dragonfly lay on the ice beside the trough, its wings spread flat and furred with rime. Mabry thought it dead. She was about to flick it into the ditch when it lifted its head, turned the small spiral of its face towards her, and shook the frost from its wings in a fine violet dust. She carried it into the byre in her cupped palms and set it on the warm beam above the mare's stall, where the lamp smoke rose.

Every morning after that she checked the beam. The dragonfly did not eat, and it did not fly, but each dawn its wings were a little more open, and each dusk a thread of lavender light trailed from its body down the whitewashed wall, as if someone had drawn the path of a stream with a wet brush. Her sons laughed and said she was keeping a ghost. Mabry said nothing, but she left the byre door ajar at night so the dragonfly could see the stars.

On the last night of February the wind came from the west and the ice went out of the dyke with a sound like a gun. In the morning the beam was empty. The mare stood at the door with her ears forward, and the trail of pale light ran out across the wet field, down the dyke and away towards the sea. Mabry went after it in her bare feet, laughing at herself, until the sun was up and the ground under her was green.