Watercolour-style dragonfly tattoo with orange, purple and blue wings and black outline on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour dragonfly on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly sits across the top of a foot, with its body drawn in black and its wings outlined in black and filled with soft orange, purple and blue washes. Small black dots scatter around the wings, and the linework is thick and loose. The colour ink dominates the composition against pale skin and a silvery background.

Other Dragonfly Insect Dot Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been up the tower since the tide turned, scraping salt off the lens with a rag that smelled of paraffin, when the first dragonfly found the gallery rail. It was the end of August and the air over the cliff had gone thick and gold. She watched it hang there, wings catching the low sun, so that the orange in them spilled across the iron and the blue went thin as a vein.

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Her father had told her dragonflies could fly backwards and sideways at once. She had believed him for a whole summer, until the schoolmaster laughed. By then her father was dead, so she never got to argue. The log book was still in his neat hand on the desk below, Sunday to Sunday: wind, visibility, the hour the lamp was lit. Beneath the last entry, in pencil, he had once written a line that had nothing to do with weather. Nell asked about the moths.

The dragonfly lifted, dipped toward the sea, then came back and settled on the brass beside her hand. Dried spray speckled the glass behind it like seed. It was so still she could see the dark body, thin as a pin, and the wings stitched with paler veins that ran out to nothing at the edges.

She went down the iron stairs at dusk, took the book from its hook and wrote in her own careful copy of his hand: wind light, south-west. One visitor. Stayed until the lamp was lit. Then she climbed back up, struck the match, and watched the beam swing out over the water, and somewhere above the rail a small bright shape turned once in the light and was gone.