Small solid black dragonfly tattoo on the inner wrist, worn beside stacked gold chain and beaded bracelets.

Small dragonfly tattoo on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black dragonfly with outstretched wings sits on the inner wrist, drawn as a simple silhouette with no interior shading. The tattoo is in black ink only and is set against pale skin. Several gold chain and wooden bead bracelets are stacked around the wrist, sharing the frame with the tattoo.

Forearm Dragonfly Insect Wrist Bracelet Chain Bead

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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

Mother said the dragonflies over Hobb's Drain were the last bad luck of the summer, so nobody thought twice when Ida Pask came down the lane with a tin of lamp-black and a sheet of brown card pulled from her father's old ledger. She sat on the footbridge with her boots off and pressed the card flat under her knee, the way the printer in Wisbech pressed his proofs.

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The eel men wanted something to nail to the tailboard of the coal cart, and Ida had promised them a dragonfly with its wings thrown wide, like a man stretching after a long pull at the oars. She cut eleven before the light went. Each one was a single dark stroke for the body and four blades for the wings, with no inside lines at all, because she had watched a real one die on the windowsill and noticed how its colour drained out all at once, like a lamp turned down.

On the last evening her brother Tom came up from the staithe with a length of gold chain he had found tangled in the reeds, and asked if she could make it into something a man could wear without shame. She said the chain was too thin for shame and too bright for mud, and that she would give him a dragonfly instead, the sort that never lands on anything it cannot leave. He took the card from the bridge rail and held it up against the sky, and the wings went almost see-through at the edges.

The next morning the carts went out with their tailboards stamped, and a dragonfly rode at the back of each, turning in the wind off the drain. Ida counted them from the bridge until the last one dipped behind the reeds, then went home and found the lamp-black tin empty, with nothing left to cut.