Black and grey tattoo of a winged fairy beside the word Believe in script with swirls and a star, on the skin of the back.

Fairy and Believe script on the back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small fairy with large butterfly-style wings sits beside the word Believe written in flowing script. Swirling tendrils and a small star sit around the lettering and the fairy's wings. The linework is bold with soft grey shading in the wings and lettering, and the design is in black ink only.

Lettering Back Fairy Wing Believe Script Swirl Star Butterfly

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Hanne said the fairy had lived in the dead satellite dish since before the water came up over the ring road, and that nobody had ever asked her to leave. The children climbed the rusted mast each summer to watch her wings open and close against the sky, grey as cinders and fine as wire, and they came down with their palms full of sparks.

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The trouble began when the grid failed for good and the village went dark at night. Ferryman Tobiah said the light was gone and there was nothing left to believe in but the old bulbs in the chapel. He swore he would pull the dish down for scrap. The fairy came down that same evening, perched on the end of his oar, and told him in a voice like struck glass that a thing only shines when someone keeps it turned towards the sun.

Tobiah did not believe her. He climbed the mast with a hacksaw anyway, and the wind pushed him against the metal until his hands bled. At the top he found a word scratched into the curved face of the dish, cut with great patience: Believe. Below it sat a small star, and tendrils curled away from the letters like smoke off a snuffed wick.

He turned the dish to the sun that night, and the lamps came on one by one along the ridge. Hanne says he kept the hacksaw on its hook for the rest of his life. Some mornings, she says, the fairy still sits on the rim, swinging her legs, waiting for someone to look up.