Colour tattoo of a black and watercolour-style castle with a dotted fairy dust trail and a small fairy, on the side of the ribs.

Castle and fairy with dotted trail

Dotwork · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black castle silhouette with pointed turrets and flags sits at the centre, with its lower walls filled by purple, teal and pink wash. A dotted trail of fairy dust and small star shapes loops around the top of the castle towards a tiny fairy figure. The linework is crisp and the colour fades softly into the skin, with the wash bleeding out at the base.

Dotwork Ribs Castle Fairy Star Flag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flags on the north turrets had to be scrubbed every third cycle, or the salt from the recycler mist ate the thread and they hung like wet rags. I was up on the scaffold with a brush and a bucket when Wren came whirling out of the vent shaft, trailing her sparks the way she always did, as if the air up here were a sky she had been given to draw on.

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Wren was a maintenance sprite, nothing more, a little brass frame with a lamp for a heart and a dust hopper where a skirt would be. Old Mother Oyelaran had built her from scrap in the first dome, and then built the castle around her, out of the shell of a cargo hauler, painted black so the sun-lamps would not blind the children. The colours came later, when the paint store flooded and all that was left was the blue-violet of the reactor glow, the pink of the hydroponic lights, and the green of the algae tanks spilling down the lower walls. Mother said a castle ought to look like it was melting into the place it stood.

Wren circled the highest spire three times, laying down her trail of glitter-dust, and I finally understood what she was asking. The dust settled where the old observation deck's star-field had once been, painting the dark sky of the shell back onto the dome ceiling. Every loop she made told the sensors the ceiling was still holding.

Mother died in the spring. I kept the brush. I kept the flags straight, and when the dust ran thin I climbed up and refilled Wren's hopper myself, and she looped the spire for me, bright as a promise nobody had asked her to make.