Watercolour-style dragonfly tattoo with black linework and pink, purple and teal washes on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour dragonfly on the upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with outstretched translucent wings is tattooed across the upper back, with its body and tail drawn in dark linework. The wings and surrounding areas are filled with soft pink, purple and teal washes that blend into one another, giving a loose watercolour effect. The dragonfly is centred on the shoulder blade against a plain, softly lit background.

Back Dragonfly Insect Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the river changed its course, a dyer named Anu lived where the reeds grew thick at the bend. She had three daughters and one wall that never dried. Every morning she hung cloth on it in rose and violet and the green of young barley, and every morning the sun took a little colour out of it.

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Her youngest, Sefa, watched the dragonflies that came off the water to rest on the drying poles. She asked her mother why they were so thin you could nearly see through them, and why their wings held the light like wet glass. Anu said the river kept them clear by lending them its colours and taking them back at dusk. Sefa did not believe her, so she caught one in cupped hands, carried it to the wall, and asked it to show her where the colour went.

The dragonfly stayed still for a long time. Then it lifted, and where its wings crossed the cloth they left a bloom of rose and teal that spread slowly, like ink in milk. Sefa ran to the river, dipped her fingers in the shallows, and tried to pull that colour out of the water and onto the dry stones. The stones only kept the wet.

By evening the bloom on the wall had faded to a pale sheen. Anu found Sefa sitting in the mud with her hands stained to the wrist, and she did not scold her. She took the girl's hand and pressed it flat to the wall beside the fading mark, so both of them left a print. The river only lends, she said, and a lender is owed a little of your hands.