Back tattoo of a seated fairy with blue wings on a spotted mushroom, set among grey and blue butterflies in a shaded woodland scene.

Fairy on a mushroom across the back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A seated fairy with blue-winged detail sits on a spotted mushroom, with a tree stump and foliage in the background. The fairy is drawn in fine grey outline with soft grey shading, while the wings and several butterflies are filled in blue. Pale grey butterflies are scattered down the left side and blue butterflies run down the right side of the back.

Back Fairy Wing Mushroom Butterfly Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fire, it spits when the wet logs go on. Now, where was I? Ah, the fairy. Not the cream-jug sort your nan kept on the dresser, mind, but a proper one, grey as ash in the hedge at dusk, with blue wings that caught whatever light was left.

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Her name was Wren Tallow and she lived under the stump of the big ash at the bottom of Harrow Field, the one the lightning split the year before my father was born. Every morning she'd climb the spotted cap of the mushroom that grew out of its roots and sit there with her knees drawn up, watching the butterflies come off the hawthorn in their hundreds. The pale ones first, like scraps of paper blown off a line. Then the blue ones, once the sun cleared the hill, and that was when she'd unfold her wings and show off.

Now the farmer's boy, Eli Corran, had a bad habit of cutting the hedges too early, and one February he took the whole lot down with the billhook. Wren came out to find her stump bare and her butterflies gone to the bottom of the ditch. She sat on the mushroom all that day and never said a word, which the old folk said was worse than shouting.

Eli came back the next morning with a sack of seed and a face like a wet Sunday. He didn't say sorry. He just set a row of foxgloves and hawthorn whips along the ditch and knelt there till his knees went numb. Wren came down and perched on his shoulder, and she flicked one blue wing against his ear. That was the whole of her forgiveness, and it was enough.