Teal watercolour-style dragonfly tattoo with a thin dark body running down the upper back of a woman with her hands raised to her hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal dragonfly on upper back

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A teal dragonfly sits across the upper back, with translucent wings washed in blue-green tones and darker speckles. A thin, dark line forms the body and extends down the centre of the back. The bare skin is softly lit against a pale background, with the subject's hair and raised arms cropped at the top of the frame.

Back Dragonfly Insect Wing Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the last week of August the apples at Hollin Orchard were heavy enough to bend the limbs, and old Mary Pennick said the dragonfly would come back to the pond to count them. Nobody believed her except the children.

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Her grandson Tom, eleven, carried a bucket of windfalls down to the water's edge every evening. One dusk a dragonfly the colour of sea glass hung above the reeds and would not leave. Its wings were thin as rinsed muslin, washed through with teal where the last light caught them. Tom tied a length of green cotton to its long dark body, meaning only to keep it near, and it dragged the thread over the hedge like a kite.

It led him past the far gate and along the last row of Bramleys to a stone trough nobody had filled since the war. Under the water lay a copper ring with a name scratched inside it, the name of a girl who had gone out to pick apples and never come home. When Tom carried it up the lane, Mary sat a long time turning it in her fingers without speaking.

That night the orchard was still. Tom untied the cotton, and the dragonfly rose over the hedge and was gone. In the morning the trough was full to its lip, and a single Bramley lay on the stone, split open and bright as a coin.