Realistic coloured tattoo of a blue and purple dragonfly with shaded wings and a green-blue body on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic blue dragonfly on a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A photograph of a realistic dragonfly tattoo on skin, shown with its body angled towards the viewer and its long segmented abdomen extending upwards. The wings are shaded in blue and violet with pale highlights along the veins, and the head and thorax are rendered in teal, green and yellow with a soft cast shadow that gives a three-dimensional effect. The subject is centred on a plain skin background, with clear plastic sheeting visible at the edge of the frame.

Realism Calf Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragonfly came in through the lantern room door just as I was trimming the wick, hovering over the brass rail as if it had been sent with a message. Father would have swatted it. He swatted everything that wasn't gull or fog or the tide table. But it went straight for the lens, a hard blue thing with wings like the glass in a chapel window, and settled on the rim of the lamp housing where the warmth was.

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Dragonflies don't come out this far, not on Scarrow Head. The nearest marsh is six miles inland, past the chapel and the flooded quarry. I had seen only one in my life, at nine, held in Mother's palm before she let it go over the wall. She said they flew backwards when they were frightened and forwards when they knew where they were going. This one held perfectly still while the beam swept round, its body lit green along the spine, and I thought it must know something about the sea that I didn't.

The supply boat was due at four. Father had not climbed the stairs since Tuesday, when the cough got into his chest and stayed. I went down for the spare mantle, and when I came back up the rail was bare except for a faint sheen, like breath on a mirror. I stood there a long while, watching the light go out over the water and come back, and told myself that was all I had come up for.

At dusk the boat's lamp showed on the swell, small and yellow. I wound the clockwork and let the big lens turn. When the first beam swung over the rocks, something blue lifted from the gallery rail, turned once in the light, and went north towards the marsh. I wrote it in the log: one dragonfly, lantern room, half past five. Wind west, visibility good.