Colour realism tattoo of a blue and purple dragonfly with shaded wings and a shadow, placed on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic dragonfly on a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly seen from above and slightly angled, with a long segmented teal body, green head and thorax, and six thin dark legs. Its wings are shaded in blues, teal and violet with pale highlights, and a soft grey shadow beneath it gives a three-dimensional effect. The subject sits centrally on smooth skin against a plain light background.

Realism Calf Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter Hanif left Oram Wells with four barrels on his cart and a promise to the tanner's widow that he would be back before the rains. By the second noon the barrels rang hollow when he knocked them, and the road ahead shimmered like a sheet of tin. A dragonfly came out of that shimmer and settled on the reins, its body the green-blue of a bottle held to the sun, its wings the colour of violets pressed in a book.

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It did not fly off when he spoke to it. It lifted, circled the mule twice, and went on ahead along the road, stopping on each fence post to wait for him. Hanif had heard his grandmother say that dragonflies know where water lies under the crust, and that a man who follows one has either lost his wits or found the well. He had no other plan, so he followed.

The insect led him off the road to a broken line of rocks below the old pass, where the sand was dark and cool to the touch. It hovered over a crack no wider than a finger. Hanif dug with his hands until his nails split, then with the tin cup, until grey water seeped up and filled the hollow he had made.

He filled every barrel before he drank. When he finally knelt to the water himself, the dragonfly was already gone, but its shadow lay on the wet sand beside the hollow, faint and grey, and it stayed there long after the sun had moved on.