Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three dragonflies and an ornate key

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows three dragonflies, two large and one smaller, arranged around an ornate key with a filigree scrolled bow and a bit with a stepped pattern. The linework is fine and dark, with delicate wing veins, dotted detailing and small pink highlights on the dragonflies' bodies. The design is on a pale grey background with no shading beyond the light pink tones.

Fine line Dragonfly Key Filigree Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Tulley's workshop smelled of paraffin and cold brass, and the drawer of unclaimed keys had been waiting since Lent for someone to come back for them. Nell was the one who sorted it. She had learned to tell a wards key from a lever key by the weight of it in her palm, and she could say which lock a bit had come from by its stepped teeth alone.

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In July the dragonflies came up off the mere behind the church, three of them, blue as struck matches, and they hung over the workshop window as though they had business there. Nell's father swore they were after the oil. Nell thought they wanted in. She began leaving the window open an inch every evening, and every morning there was a key on the sill that had not been on the sill before: an old bow worked like a fern of iron scrolls, a bit cut in neat steps, nothing she could match to any drawer in the shop.

She kept them in a biscuit tin until the August bank holiday, when the drawer's last key finally went to a man who had lost his own in the river. That night she tried the strangest of them against the back door, and it turned with a sound like a breath let out. Outside, the three dragonflies rose from the reeds all at once and went off over the rooftops, and she stood in the doorway with her hand still on the brass, understanding for the first time that the shop had been waiting for her to leave it.