Realistic colour tattoo of a dragonfly with purple and blue wings and a green body, placed on a person's chest.

Realistic dragonfly on a chest

Realism · Chest · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly is shown in flight with its wings spread and its long abdomen angled diagonally upward. Smooth shading and highlights give the body and wings a three-dimensional look, and a soft cast shadow sits beneath the insect. Purple, blue and green ink dominates against pale skin with some redness around the design.

Realism Chest Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every summer the dragonflies came up from the canal behind Fenwick House, and every summer the old woman on the fourteenth floor said they were the lock-keepers come back to check on the stairwells. Nobody argued with her. She was the only one left who knew which lift would take you down without sighing.

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Nell Parr was nine the afternoon the lift stopped between the sixth and seventh floors. Rain ran down the little window in the doors. A dragonfly, long as her finger and green as a bottle end, hung in the air beside her shoulder, its wings catching the strip light in blue and violet. It did not bother her. It seemed to be waiting for her to ask something.

So she asked how to get home. The dragonfly turned, slow and deliberate, and the lift shuddered and opened on the ninth floor, where her mother was not, but the canal smell was. Nell followed the shadow it threw on the concrete walkway, which was darker than any shadow ought to be, and it led her to the landing with the broken window that the council had boarded twice and the damp had unboarded again.

Her mother found her there at dusk, asleep with her cheek on the cold sill and a feather of light across her palm. The lift worked perfectly the next morning. Nell still takes the stairs on wet days, and she still says good morning to any insect that comes up from the water, just in case it remembers her.