Colour tattoo of a cartoon mouse with closed eyes and large purple and blue fairy wings, shaded in soft greys, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon mouse with fairy wings on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon mouse sits hunched with its paws raised near its closed eyes, with large fairy-style wings behind it and a thin curled tail. The mouse is shaded in soft grey with smooth gradients, while the wings are filled with purple and lavender tones and edged in blue. The tattoo fills most of the frame on the upper arm, with a red top visible at the edge of the photo.

Upper arm Mouse Wing Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You were not meant to find the wings. The ferry from the mainland had left a cabin trunk on the quay at Scarrow, and inside it, folded under a moth-eaten tablecloth, were the lilac wings of a fairy who had retired to the lighthouse. You found them first, which is how you ended up with them, and nobody on the island has quite forgiven you for the rest of the summer.

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The trouble was that wings are no use to a mouse who has never climbed anything taller than a ladle. You tried the lighthouse steps. You tried the gorse on Hob's Hill, where the wind is strong enough to lift a gull. Each time the wings filled with air and each time you came down in the nettles, bruised and tangled, the blue edges crumpled like a letter read too often. Mrs Penhallow from the bakery swept you out of her flour bin twice and told you that fairies were supposed to be sensible.

By October you had stopped trying. You sat on the seawall with your paws pressed over your eyes, listening to the gulls argue about the weather, while the tide came up round your feet and went away again without asking your opinion. You had decided that a mouse with wings was only a mouse who could fall further, and that was almost a comfort.

Then the storm came in off the Atlantic, the boats were all out, and a small grey shape in the wrack was the only thing on the harbour that noticed the lamp had gone dark. You did not fly. You ran, wings dragging, down the slipway, and the keeper's grandson was waiting at the bottom with a torch he had not yet learned to hold steady. Fairies, you have since decided, are simply mice who kept going.