Small black and grey dragonfly tattoo in a fine line style on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Small dragonfly on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small dragonfly is tattooed on the skin near the wrist, with its body and four wings drawn in thin outlines. The linework is dark and even, with light grey shading inside the wings and along the body. The tattoo sits centred in the frame against plain, pale skin, with a wooden surface blurred in the background.

Fine line Forearm Dragonfly Insect Wing

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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

You are nine the summer the pond behind Hollins Row turns blue with dragonflies, and your mother sends you down to the slag edge with a jam jar because the old men say the ones that gather over pit water bring rain. Your boots are too big, Danny's hand-me-downs with newspaper stuffed in the toes. You do not care about rain. You care that Danny has been under the ground since Tuesday and nobody will say when he is coming up.

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The pond is the colour of stewed tea. Reeds push out of the spoil like bristles, and the dragonflies stitch the air above them, each one a dark pencil line with four thin wings. One settles on the rim of your jar. You hold very still, the way Danny taught you to hold still for rabbits, and count to forty. Up the road the siren starts, then stops, which the deputy at the chapel says means nothing, or else means everything, and nobody will tell a child which.

You do not catch it. You lift the jar and tip it, and the dragonfly goes up in a flicker of grey, circling the winding gear twice before it heads over the rooftops toward the allotments where Danny used to dig for worms. You watch until it is a speck, then a thought, then nothing at all.

When you get home the kitchen is full of coats and nobody is looking at the door. Danny is sitting on the back step with his hands loose in his lap, black to the elbows, grinning at the yard as if he has been waiting all along. The jam jar is still in your fist, empty. You tell him about the rain. He tells you it's coming. Neither of you believes it, and both of you go out to the yard anyway to wait.