Black and grey fine line tattoo on a upper back showing a fairy silhouette with a wand, sparkling stars and the quote All the world is made of faith, and pixie dust.

Fairy silhouette and quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a fairy holding a wand sits to the right of the design, with small star-shaped sparkles trailing from the wand. A curved line of handwritten-style lettering runs diagonally across the upper back, reading All the world is made of faith, and pixie dust. The work is entirely black ink on pale skin, with crisp edges and no shading beyond the solid fill of the silhouette.

Lettering Back Fairy Silhouette Wand Star Sparkle Quote Script

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 chronometer had stopped again, and Tilly Ferrier was the only one aboard who would admit it. She crouched on the wet deck of the Hesper with the brass case open on her knees, tapping the glass the way her father used to, as if the sea might be shamed into keeping time. Forty-one days out of Valparaiso and the wind had gone to nothing. The sails hung like washing. Captain Lusk had stopped asking for the figures.

Keep reading

Below, the cook's boy was singing something about a mermaid, badly. Tilly took the stub of pencil from behind her ear and worked the sums on the back of an old bill of lading, the way Mr Doyle had taught her in the years before the fever took him. Latitude, a guess. Longitude, a guess with a prayer tied to the end of it. She had told no one that the guessing was the only honest thing on the ship.

That night the water went alight. Each time the oars dipped, the sea sparked green and gold, a spill of tiny lamps that clung to the blades and then slid away into the dark in a loose line, all pointing the same way. The watch crowded the rail. Lusk came up in his nightshirt, and for once he did not frown. Tilly held up the dead chronometer, looked from it to the glittering wake, and understood that she had been trying to take a fix from the wrong sky for a month.

At dawn a breeze came up from the quarter the sparks had pointed to, soft and sudden, and the canvas filled like a held breath let go. Lusk wrote the course in his own hand and did not ask her for the figures again. Tilly kept the stopped chronometer in her coat pocket after that. It was no use for telling time, but it was good for a laugh when the sums would not come right, and the sea, it seemed, had never needed them to.