Black tribal-style dragonfly tattoo design on a white background, with swirling wings and a segmented body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dragonfly design

Black and grey · Flash

A dragonfly drawn in bold black tribal linework, with wings spread wide and a long, segmented body running downward. The wings use sweeping curves with solid black fills and small cut-out details, while the body is built from interlocking loops and teardrop shapes. The design is shown in black ink alone on a plain white background, with no body part visible.

Dragonfly Insect Tribal Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Holm Ferry ran brown after the spring floods, and Ada Penrose had not been to the other bank in eleven years. Her brother's wedding was on the far side, in the chapel above the mill, and the only boat left was her grandfather's flat-bottomed punt, chained under the willows with its oars gone soft from rot.

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She found new oars in the shed behind the forge, and a coil of tarred rope, and a jar of pitch that smelled of pine. The old ferryman, Tobias Greave, watched from his doorstep with a pipe gone cold in his teeth. He said the river had a way of taking the thing you least wanted to lose, and that it was a poor bargain to cross it at all in wet weather. Ada said she had never been much good at bargains. He laughed and went inside.

Halfway over, a dragonfly came down out of the alders and settled on the gunwale, wings flat and wide as a pair of dark ribbons, its long body dipping like a plumb line. It stayed there the whole crossing. When the punt bumped the stones on the far side, the insect lifted and went straight up into the chapel bell-rope's shadow, and Ada understood that she had been counted and let through.

She tied the punt to the iron ring and walked up the lane with the pitch still on her hands. At the chapel door her brother was waiting in a borrowed coat, looking back at the water. He said he had thought she would never come. Ada told him the river had been kind enough to carry her, and that she would row back the same way, with him in the stern, if he would have it.