Black silhouette design of a fairy with butterfly wings sitting on a crescent moon and holding a star, with sparkles drifting behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fairy silhouette on a crescent moon

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a seated fairy with butterfly wings, holding a small star up in one hand. She sits on the inner curve of a thick crescent moon, with a trail of tiny stars and dots rising in the upper right. The design uses flat black fills with fine white cut-out detail in the wings, set against a plain white background.

Fairy Crescent moon Star Sparkle Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The almanac said the moon would be a paring by Thursday, and Hetty Mallow took it as a personal insult. She had kept the lamp at Scarrow Head for thirty-one years and knew the moon's moods better than the vicar knew his hymns. So when the silver went thin over the harbour wall, she climbed the hundred and four steps with a tin of paraffin in one hand and a cold pork pie in the other, and found a fairy sitting on the inside curve of the moon like a girl on a garden gate.

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Her wings were cut from the night itself, black with white veins like frost on a window, and she held a star up to the lamplight the way a jeweller holds a stone. "You've dropped one," Hetty said. "Dropped nothing," said the fairy. "The sea wanted a light, so I lent it one. Now the moon's a sliver and I must pay the stars back before they notice." She eyed the pie. Hetty, who had never once in her life given away a pie, sat down on the cold stone and broke it in half.

They bargained until the tide turned. The fairy would return the star if Hetty trimmed the wick of the great lamp and kept the beam steady until dawn, so the fishing boats could find their way past the Stacks. Hetty agreed, on condition that the fairy never again sat on her moon without asking.

Hetty climbed back down with the paraffin slopping and her knees complaining. At the top of the tower she turned the wick high and the beam swept out over the black water. Far above, the moon thickened by the width of a fingernail, and a single star slid from a silver hand and dropped, bright as a struck match, into the lens. The next morning Hetty found sparkles in her hair, and the almanac, which had got everything else wrong, said nothing about any of it.