Fine line drawing of two dragonflies with pink and blue swirls and dots, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two dragonflies with swirls

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows two dragonflies with outlined wings and thin antennae, one placed above and to the right of the other. Pink and blue swirls and small dots trail from the dragonflies and curl across the lower right of the page. The linework is black and fine, with the pink and blue used as accents on the swirls and dots against a plain white background.

Fine line Dragonfly Swirl Dot Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Ur-Saba was low that summer, and the reed-cutter's two daughters had not spoken since the spring flood. Ninsun, the elder, said the water had taken their grandmother's bronze comb. Ennu, the younger, said it had not, and that the comb lay in the mud by the old landing where nobody thought to look.

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The dragonflies came down the channel each evening, thin as thread and dark as ink, and the girls had always counted them as they passed. That evening two of them hung over the shallows and dropped low, one a little above the other. Where they paused, a scatter of light lay on the water like beads spilled from a string, and beyond it the silt curled in a slow spiral around something that glinted.

Ennu waded out first. Ninsun, who had said nothing all day, followed with an armful of cut reeds to float on. Together they worked the comb free of the mud. Neither of them apologised. The elder laid the reeds across the water in a spiral, the way their mother set out offerings for the river, and the younger knotted her pink headcloth to the last reed so it would not drift away.

The dragonflies rose back up the channel and the sisters watched until the light failed. Ninsun kept the comb. Ennu kept the scrap of cloth. Every year after, when the water fell, they walked down to the landing together and counted the dragonflies as they came, and they took turns deciding which of them had been right.