Dark red dragonfly silhouette on a pale grey background, shown as a flat design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red dragonfly design

Colour · Flash

A solid dark red dragonfly silhouette with angular, notched wings spread diagonally across the frame, a slender segmented abdomen and two antennae. The image is a flat, filled shape with no shading, with a dotted line trailing from the lower part of the body. The plain light grey background gives the single-colour design strong contrast.

Dragonfly Wing Insect Antennae Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is only good for the next three words, so you'll have to lean in like a gossip. This is about Marra the lamplighter's daughter, who lived at the edge of the salt marshes of Oss, where the kingdom's last dry road ran out into reeds. Nobody in Oss owned a boat, so when the great tide came in one spring and took the eastern bridge, the people were stuck on their side of the water with their goats and their grievances. Marra said she would fetch the bridge-keeper's rope from the drowned post, and her mother said she would do no such thing, and so of course she went at first light.

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She waded out with a red-handed lantern tied to her wrist and a length of tarred cord over her shoulder. The water came up to her chin and then, quite suddenly, it did not. A dragonfly was hovering over the surface, red as a coal and as still as a held breath. It had wings cut like the edges of old flags, notched where the wind had tried to tear them. Behind it trailed a line of little dots across the water, a path of stepping stones that had not been there the moment before. Marra put her foot on the first one. It held.

She crossed the whole flooded mile on that dotted road, and the dragonfly went ahead of her, dipping its slender body now and then as if to say mind the gap. At the drowned post she found the rope, and she found something else tangled in it, a small iron bell that had once belonged to the bridge-keeper's dead son. When she rang it, the stones glowed faintly and the tide drew back a single hand's width.

That was enough. The people walked over on dry ground, and the dragonfly went home to the reeds, and Marra's mother never once again told her not to go. The bell still hangs in the lamp-house at Oss. If you want to hear it, you only need to hold your breath and wait for the water to be still.