Colourful watercolour-style dragonfly tattoo with blue, purple and pink wings on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour dragonfly on the upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with translucent wings and a dark, white-banded body is tattooed on the inner upper arm. The wings shade from blue through violet to pink, with loose colour splashes and drips around the body and a streak of orange and green trailing from the tail. The design is set centrally on the arm against a dark background.

Upper arm Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Marrow kept the mill pond the way other people kept hens, counting every reed and scolding the eels. The summer the drought came, the water sank so low that the stickleback families tangled themselves in the weed, and the dragonflies settled on the mud and could not lift off again. Their wings had gone dull as tin foil. Marrow said nothing about it for a week, which was how the village knew it was serious.

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Then one morning a girl walked down from the lock with a paintbox tucked under her arm and a jar of rainwater balanced on her head. She knelt by the nearest dragonfly, the one with the banded tail, and dipped her brush. Blue first, she told it, because blue was what the sky had forgotten. Then violet, borrowed from the bruises on the plums. Then a little pink, for the stubbornness of the weed. She laid the wings down in thin washes that dried faster than she could blow on them, and wherever the colour ran past the edge she let it drip.

The dragonfly lifted. The others followed one by one, each carrying a stripe of colour that trailed from its tail like a spilled ribbon. By evening the pond had gone quiet in a new way, and Marrow noticed the girl had left her brush behind on the bank.

Some say the orange streak at the end of the tail is the last of her paint, still wet. Marrow says it is a warning: colour is only ever lent, and it always finds its way back to the water.