Black and grey pencil sketch of a winged fairy seated on a mushroom with spiral swirls, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Fairy seated on a mushroom, pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a winged fairy with pointed ears and swirling hair, reclining on the cap of a mushroom whose stem ends in a curling spiral base. The linework is dark and confident, with soft pencil shading on the wings, mushroom cap and stem. The design is entirely black and grey on a plain white background, with decorative curls filling the wings and the base of the stem.

Fairy Mushroom Wing Swirl Spiral Hair

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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

Dear Nell, you will not believe what I found in the bilge stores this morning, and I have decided not to tell Captain Rourke, because he would have it thrown over the side before breakfast. Under the sacking where the onions were kept, there was a mushroom the size of a serving platter, pale as candle wax, growing up out of a crate of damp biscuit. Sitting on the cap of it, ankles crossed as if she owned the deck, was a fairy. Not a child's fairy. Her hair stood up in curls like sea foam in a bucket, her wings were the grey of a pencil rubbing, and she looked at me the way the mate looks at a short-weighted sack.

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I asked her what she wanted. She said the galley fire, a bit of salt pork rind, and that the mushroom's stem went down through three decks and into the sea. Every spiral at its foot, she said, was a sailor who had gone over without a proper goodbye. I did not believe her until she showed me. I will not write down what I saw turning in that swirl at the base, only that it spun like the bottom of a whirlpool and that the cook's bell rang on its own.

So I have made her a bargain. Each Sunday I leave her a pan of fried bread, and she keeps the weevils out of the flour and the rats away from the hams. Yesterday she tapped the cap with one bare heel and the whole mushroom shivered, and a fine ring of spores drifted down onto the sugar tin like snow. Tell Mother I am eating properly. Tell her the fairy eats more than I do. Your loving brother, Tom.