Two solid black silhouette tattoos on the inner wrist, a winged fairy on the left and a figure in a pointed cap and running pose on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fairy and boy silhouettes on wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs show the inner wrist and forearm of a person with dark nail polish, with a solid black silhouette tattoo in each image. The left shows a winged fairy crouching on a small clump of grass, and the right shows a slim figure in a pointed cap mid-stride. The silhouettes have smooth, filled edges with no internal shading, and the plain skin and warm indoor lighting keep the focus on the ink.

Forearm Fairy Silhouette Wing Figure Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ashby cut silhouettes in the back room of the post office every Thursday, and by the summer of 1956 my younger brother Dennis had worn out two pairs of scissors pretending he was the one doing it. We lived above the chemist's in Holme Cross, where the high street ran downhill to the river and nothing happened twice. Mrs Ashby sold the cut paper for a penny a piece, black card mounted on white, and the one that sold best was a fairy crouched on a clump of grass, her wings lifted like a folded fan.

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Dennis wanted the boy. He wanted the pointed cap and the long legs mid-stride, the one who would never grow up. Ashby said the boy was harder, because a body with a jump in it has to be cut in one unbroken line or it looks as if it has been trodden on. So Dennis practised on newspaper every night after the shop shut, cutting until his fingers cramped and the lino was littered with small black hopes.

The flood came over the wall in October and filled the back room to the shelves. When the water went down, Ashby found his stock soaked to pulp except for one sheet pinned inside a ledger: a boy with a point to his cap, cut in a single line that never lifted. Dennis had done it in the dark, by the light of the gas ring, while the rest of us slept.

Ashby pressed it flat under his big atlas and gave it to Dennis without a word. Thirty years later my brother still keeps it framed above his bed in Leeds, the fairy hung beside it, the pair of them faded at the edges and never quite apart.