Multicoloured watercolour-style dragonfly tattoo on a person's upper back and shoulder, with the words Never give up in black script beneath one wing.

Watercolour dragonfly with never give up script

Lettering · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A dragonfly with soft, multicoloured wings in blue, green, pink and yellow sits over the shoulder blade, its body and tail running diagonally across the skin. Black cursive script reading Never give up sits below the lower wing. The wings have loose, feathered edges and scattered dark dots, and the photo shows the tattoo on bare skin against a brick wall.

Lettering Shoulder Back Dragonfly Wing Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come in out of the wind and sit where the fire can warm your back. This is about Ione, who cut reeds on the grey flats below the hill town, where the river spread itself thin and nobody trusted the water. Her brother had gone out after eels one autumn and not come back, and the elders said the marsh had taken him, as it takes everyone who stops paying attention to it.

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Ione did not stop paying attention. She watched the dragonflies. They hung over the channels in the hot hours, bodies like needles of blue glass, and their wings caught the light so that each one seemed painted in a new colour: green at the edges, rose in the veins, a pale yellow where the sun went through. The old women said a dragonfly ate the mosquitoes and so kept the fever away, but Ione thought they were simply stubborn. They flew into the wind when the wind was against them and came out the other side.

So when the flood came again and the reed-bed began to slide, she went out on the one plank she had, pushing it with a pole and calling her brother's name at every bend. The water was brown and cold and wanted her. Twice the plank tipped. Twice she dragged herself back onto it and stood, shaking, and told the water, quite clearly, that she was not finished. Somewhere a dragonfly lifted off a reed and settled on her wrist, wings still, and she took that for an answer.

She found him on a mud bank at dusk, wrapped in a torn net and too weak to shout. She did not tell the elders about the dragonfly. She told them she had simply refused to stop looking, and that the marsh had found it a poor bargain. Now, when the children ask why the reed-cutters paint a blue wing on the lintel of every hut, I tell them the marsh respects only those who keep looking, and then I send them to bed, because the night is cold and the eels are waiting.