Black fairy silhouette with swirled wings and a dotted star trail on the neck behind the ear, in a solid black tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fairy silhouette and star trail behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a fairy with swirl-patterned wings sits on the skin just behind the ear, with a trail of small dots and four-pointed stars drifting down towards the nape of the neck. The fairy is filled in solid black, while the wings are outlined with a fine pattern of spirals and open sections. The photograph is a close, slightly angled view with dark hair at the top left and a soft, neutral background.

Neck Fairy Wing Star Silhouette Dot Spiral

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the nets. You want the one about the fairy who sold her wings to the tide? Good. Then listen, because I'll not tell it twice before the boats come in.

Keep reading

Her name was Merrin, and she lived under the slipway at Porthcaddy, where the weed hangs down like wet hair and the lamp on the breakwater never once went dark. Every night she sat on the bottom rung of the iron ladder and counted the herring boats coming home by their lights. Thirty-one, she counted, the winter the Gull went down off the Head. Thirty-one lights, and one that never came back round the point.

Now the sea is a greedy old thing. It wanted a fair price for the Gull's men, and it sent up for Merrin's wings. She had them spun from spider silk and the thinnest scale of a mackerel, rolled in spirals like the curl of a fern. The tide took them in a single breath, and the stars that had lived in those wings came loose and drifted up the cliff path behind her, dropping one by one into the dark like sparks off a dying fire.

She did not complain. A fairy with no wings is a poor sort of thing, but she can still climb a ladder, and Merrin climbed every one of those stars back up to the lamp. She set each one in its place along the breakwater wall, and to this day the boats come home by her light, though nobody has ever seen the wings.