Fairy silhouette beside a bare tree

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a winged fairy stands beside a large bare tree, with its branches reaching across the design and small leaves falling around the figure. The linework is bold and the ink is fully saturated black, with no shading or greys, and the roots spread along the bottom edge. The photograph is taken straight on against a grey carpet, with the design filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Botanical Thigh Fairy Silhouette Tree Leaves Root Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm said the pear tree outside the infirmary had been dead since before either of us took vows, and he said it every winter as though the tree might take offence and flower to spite him. I came up the hill that October with a satchel, a cough and no talent for anything but copying, so I was given the scriptorium and told to keep my eyes on the vellum. My eyes kept drifting to the window instead.

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In my second March I found a woman sitting in the lowest fork of that dead tree, picking at the bark with a thumbnail. She was no taller than a candle and her wings were the colour of wet muslin. I asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted the wood back. A brother had felled the living limb a hundred years ago to make the refectory benches, she said, and she had been living in the stump ever since, eating moss and waiting for someone to notice.

I went to the prior that same evening with a question about grammar and came away with the keys to the orchard shed. Brother Anselm found us at dawn, leaning on the trunk, and crossed himself so hard his sleeve caught on a branch. The fairy laughed at him. Nothing about the tree changed that day, except that buds came along the grey wood like pinpricks through paper, and the first leaves dropped around her feet in a slow spiral.

We never told the abbot. He still says the pear is dead. I still copy his psalms by the window, and every evening a small hand knocks on the glass, and I go out to hear what she wants next.