Fine line black dragonfly tattoo with detailed wing veins, placed on the inner wrist.

Small dragonfly on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small dragonfly is tattooed on the inner wrist, shown in a close photograph with the wings spread horizontally and the body angled downwards. The linework is thin and even, with the wing veins drawn in detail and the wings partly shaded in grey. The ink is solid black against the skin, and the subject sits centrally on a plain light background of skin and a textured blanket.

Fine line Forearm Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive on the Hollin Skerry boat with a tin of tea and your late mother's spectacles in your coat, and the old keeper, Aldous Pim, doesn't look up from the rail where he is picking at a dead gull. "They come off the marsh in August," he says. "Don't swat them. They eat the midges, and the midges would eat us."

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Dragonflies gather on the lamp housing in the evenings, hanging from the brass fittings with their wings held flat as if they are reading the sky. You learn to tell the darters from the hawkers by the way they land. Pim keeps a logbook of them beside the tide tables, pencil drawings of wing veins so fine you need the lantern to see them. "Every one has its own map," he says. "Nobody's ever bothered to check."

In September the weather turns and the boat does not come for nine days. Pim coughs through the nights, and by the sixth he cannot manage the stair. You keep the light alone, trimming the wick, winding the clockwork, writing the entries in his careful hand and then in your own. On the eighth evening a single dragonfly settles on the rail beside the glass, wings spread wide and perfectly still in the last of the sun.

You sit with it until the lamp is lit and the beam sweeps out over the black water. Then you open the gallery door, and it lifts away, circling once above the light before it heads east toward the mainland, where Pim says there is a churchyard with a view of the sea. You write one line in the log: Dragonfly released, 19:42, wings sound. Then you go down to tell him.