Three black ink dragonflies drawn one above another on a white background, each with ornamental swirled patterns inside the wings.

Three dragonflies with ornate wings

Black and grey · Flash

Three dragonflies are drawn in black ink on a plain white background, stacked vertically with their wings spread. The wings contain detailed scrolls, loops and filigree patterns, while the bodies are drawn with smooth outlines and segmented details. The image is entirely black and white, with the three designs evenly spaced down the page.

Dragonfly Insect Wing Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Achterberg would not let anyone touch the silver before ten o'clock. The metal remembered the cold of the night before, he said, and would crack if you hurried it. I was sixteen that winter, sweeping filings into a biscuit tin above a pawnbroker's off Icknield Street, and I believed him the way you believe anything an old man says with his mouth full of pins.

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The order came on a Tuesday in a grey envelope from a woman in Moseley who wanted three dragonflies for her daughters. She had drawn them herself, badly, and he laughed at the drawings and then stopped laughing. He drew the wire out so fine it hummed under the pliers, and he rolled each wing into scrolls no larger than a lentil, leaving the loops open at their ends. 'A scroll closed is a wall,' he said. 'Leave one open and the light has somewhere to go.'

I tried a wing myself while he was at his dinner. I closed the last loop because I was frightened it would come loose, and by morning the whole wing had gone stiff and dull, like a shut fist. He saw it and said nothing. He only bent the wire back open with his thumbnail and turned the lamp so I could see the shadow it threw on the bench.

The woman came for the brooches in March and counted them on the counter, then counted again. 'Only two,' she said. 'My youngest has gone to Canada.' Mr Achterberg wrapped the spare in tissue and put it in my hand. I still wear it on my lapel on the days I go back to that street, and the open loops catch the lamp in the bus shelter just long enough to make the commuters look up.