Pen and watercolour drawing of a dragonfly with purple, pink and turquoise wings and red ink splashes on a white background.

Watercolour dragonfly design

Mixed · Flash

A dragonfly is drawn from above with a detailed pen body, long antennae and segmented abdomen. Its wings are loose watercolour washes in magenta, violet, teal and blue, with fine ink veins and scattered red and pink spots around the body. The subject is centred on a plain white background with generous space around it.

Dragonfly Insect Wing Watercolour Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Tebbutt carried the tray down the causeway with both hands, the lacquer still tacky on the top sheet, where a dragonfly was drying on its own gloss. Every dusk the fen filled with them, and every dusk her grandmother had said a dragonfly would only fly true if its wings held the colours of something it had lost. Nell had never believed a word of it. She painted them anyway, because the lantern shop in Ely paid by the dozen and the rent on the boathouse fell due at Michaelmas.

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The one on the tray was different. She had painted its wings from memory: a magenta bruise spreading over the forewing where Tom Ashby's coat had caught on the sluice gate the winter he went south, and a teal wash over the hind pair, the colour of the shallows at Welney on a clear morning. She had not meant to paint his coat. Her brush had simply gone there, the way water finds the lowest ground, and she had let it, and the blue had bled past the veins into the white like something that would not be contained.

Three years of letters had come from Tom in that same restless hand, short and blotted. She had stopped answering in the second spring. Now she took the painted sheet down to the staithe, where the gnats hung thick above the water, and waited for the wind to turn west, because that was the way the sluice pointed and the way he had gone.

At first light she found one of the real ones clinging to the staithe post, its wings still crumpled from the chrysalis. She laid the painted sheet beside it, the magenta bruise and the teal shallows matching its pale gauze, and the two of them looked exactly like what she had meant. The real one lifted first, uneven and stubborn, and went west over the reeds towards the sluice. Nell watched until the light swallowed it. Her grandmother had been wrong about most things, but not about the flying.