Black and white photo of a small black dragonfly tattoo, in fine line style, centred on the upper back of a person with their hair in a bun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small dragonfly tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind shows a person with their hair tied in a loose bun and a thin cord necklace. A small, solid black dragonfly sits between the shoulder blades, with a slim body and simple wings drawn in fine lines. The image is black and white, with soft indoor lighting and a plain background that keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Back Dragonfly Hair bun Necklace

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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

At ten past three the fire door at the end of Ward 9 sighed open and something came in with the damp air off the car park. I was at the drugs trolley counting morphine with Ruth, and neither of us saw it until it was ticking against the strip light above the sluice. A dragonfly, in February. Ruth said it was a moth with ambitions. I said nothing, because it flew in that slow, stitched-together way they have, as if every stroke had been checked first.

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Mr Okafor in bay four had been awake since midnight, asking for his wife, who died in 1998 and who he still calls for at teatime. I went to settle him. He watched the insect over my shoulder and said his grandmother in Enugu used to say a dragonfly in the house meant someone was about to hear the truth. I told him that sounded like hard work for a bug. He laughed, the first proper laugh I'd had off him all week, then went quiet and said, "Let it stay, nurse. It's lost."

I didn't let it stay. I took a specimen pot from the cupboard, waited by the blinds, and coaxed it in with a folded sheet of observation charts. Then I walked it down the corridor to the window at the end, where the sash opens an inch. The night was cold enough to make my breath show. I tipped the pot, and nothing happened for a long moment. Then the wings lifted, dark and fine as pen strokes against the orange of the lamps over the ambulance bay.

Ruth asked later whether I'd felt ridiculous, stood at a window at half three holding an empty pot. I hadn't. I'd watched it go over the bins until it was gone, and then I went back to bay four, where Mr Okafor was waiting, and told him it had found the way out.