Small black fairy silhouette with outlined wings tattooed on the side of an ankle, photographed against a blurred purple background.

Fairy silhouette on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small fairy in solid black silhouette sits on the side of an ankle, with wings drawn in thin outline and partly filled. The figure is compact and placed slightly below the ankle bone, with pale skin around it. The background is heavily blurred in purple and dark tones, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Ankle Fairy Wing Silhouette

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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

The mate swore the thing in the rigging was a gull that had lost its way, but I had seen it the night we cleared the Nore, a small dark shape with wings like smoke, sitting on the topgallant yard as though it had paid for the seat. Nobody else looked up. I was the cook's boy, which meant I spent my watches below peeling potatoes and keeping one eye on the sky through the hatch.

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She came down to the galley on the third night out, drawn by the lamp, and asked me in a voice like a cold draught for a scrap of tallow. I gave her the end of a candle. She perched on the rim of the stove and never once turned her face to the light, only her outline, black as a cut-out against the glow. When fog came down thick off the Lizard and the binnacle lamp guttered and died, she lifted from the brass rail and hung in the wheelhouse glass with her wings spread, thin edges catching whatever light there was, until the helmsman could see the rocks ahead.

Afterwards the mate said it was a trick of the fog, and the captain said nothing at all, which was his way of owning a debt. I asked her what she wanted for it. She said only that I must never let a painter copy her shape, since they always made her too pretty and never got the wings right. I laughed, and she frowned, and then she was gone off the rail with a sound like a page turning.

We docked at Falmouth in a thin rain. On the quay bollard, where the hawsers were made fast, sat a small black figure with its wings folded, perfectly still, and when I touched the iron beside it the iron was warm as a hand. I left the candle end there, burnt down to nothing, and went up the gangway to buy a loaf.