Colour tattoo of a fairy with pink wings above a flower, with two butterflies and a trail of stars across the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fairy, butterflies and stars on lower back

Back · Colour · Photo

A fairy in a green dress with pink wings and blonde hair hovers above a yellow and orange flower, trailing a line of small black stars. Two butterflies with blue, pink and purple wings sit on either side of the design. The outlines are bold and the colour is solid, and the composition spreads across the lower back above the waistband of a pair of jeans.

Back Fairy Butterfly Star Flower Wing

Find an artist for this

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

The boats were late again, and the women of Skerry Cove had stopped pretending not to count them. Mairi Gow stood on the harbour wall with a paraffin lantern she had no use for in daylight, and she said to nobody in particular that the fairy would have to earn her keep tonight.

Keep reading

Nobody laughed. The fairy lived in the yellow flower that grew wild among the rocks below the kirk, where the sea pinks gave way to thrift. She was no bigger than a wren's egg, wore a dress the green of wet kelp, and her wings had the bloom of foxgloves in them. Two blue butterflies kept her company on the nets, and every autumn she came up the cliff path shaking stars from her hair like salt from a sieve. Old Tam Rennie claimed that was why the men always came home: for each star she dropped on the water, a boat found its way.

That night the wind went round to the north-east and the fog came down thick as wool. The lanterns on the wall were swallowed before they were lit. Mairi saw the first star on the black swell, then another, a little silver line of them laid out like stitches leading out past the skerries. She did not know if it was the fairy or only the sea-fire stirred up by the oars, and she never afterwards argued the matter with anyone who had been out that night.

The boats came in one by one, following the glitter, until the last of them, Tam's own, ground onto the shingle at the turn of the tide. Tam climbed out, looked up at the wall, and said he had counted the stars all the way home. There had been exactly as many as there were men aboard. Mairi went down to the rocks next morning and found the yellow flower open, and a single star stuck to its petal like a drop of brine.