Purple brushstroke dragonfly tattoo design with a loose trailing line below it, drawn on a plain off-white background.

Purple brushstroke dragonfly design

Colour · Flash

A dragonfly drawn in loose, expressive purple brush strokes, with four wings, a swirled head and a long thin abdomen. A single curving purple line with soft grey shading trails beneath the insect, leaving open space around the design. The wings are shaded with darker strokes and lighter wash, giving a painterly, sketched feel.

Dragonfly Wing Insect Brush stroke Swirl Line

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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

Sit yourself down, love, not that chair, the one with the spring. Mrs Pell's hall lamp has never once been used for reading, only for moths and the odd drowned bee. It was the August of the wet week, when the boarders were all sulking over cards, that a dragonfly came in through the scullery door and went round and round the lamp shade like it had lost a ring in there.

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That was when Mr Tobias Crane took up residence in room four with his paint box and his mother's bottle of violet ink. He said he had come to Saltmere to paint the marsh and had found the marsh had no interest in being painted. Every morning he sat at the front window with his brushes laid out like surgical instruments, waiting for the insect to settle on the sill so he could get it down before it moved. It never sat still for him. It went up over the roof of the chapel and came back again, quick as a thought you'd rather not have.

So he painted it the way you'd paint something you were afraid of losing. Four wings, one swipe each, the wash loose and pale on the outer edges where he'd been hurrying. He painted the head three times and wasn't happy with any of them, so he left the last one as a little curl, like a fern unrolling. When the back door was opened for the tide-smell on the last morning, the dragonfly went out over the dunes so fast he only got the tail of its flight down, one long grey trail across the paper. He packed up on the Tuesday and never came back for the rest of his things, and I've kept that paper in the drawer since.

There, now. Mind the step on your way out, and don't be going after anything with wings. Some things come in to show you a shape and then they're gone, and that's the whole of the lesson.