Black fairy silhouette tattoo with spiral-patterned wings and a trail of small stars on the neck, behind the ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fairy silhouette with stars behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a fairy in flight sits on the skin behind an ear, with spiral patterns inside the wings. A trail of small dots and two four-point stars extends down and to the left across the neck. The image is a close, well-lit photograph of healed or settled black ink on pale skin, with hair visible at the top edge.

Neck Fairy Silhouette Wing Star Dot Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan swore the fairies lived down the Hartley seam, where the coal went black and sweet and no daylight had ever reached. She said they flew ahead of the pitmen with their wings open, scattering sparks so a man could find his way back up. I thought she was daft until I watched my dad's lamp swing down the shaft-head on a November morning and saw, for one breath, a small winged shape spin off its flame.

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That winter I took a stub of soot from the range and tried to draw her. Nan's eyes were bad but her hands weren't, and she guided mine over the back of a Sunday envelope, the wings first, then the thin arms held out as if reaching for a rope. We spiralled the wings the way her mam had done on the lace collars, round and round until the paper looked like a shell. I pinned it inside the lid of his tin.

The Thursday after, the cage stuck at the three-hundred-foot landing and the men were kept below for near six hours. Mam stood at the pit gate with her shawl over her head and wouldn't sit down. Every few minutes she looked up at the sky as if it might show a light. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the crumpled fairy, and I counted the chalk dots I'd pressed along the bottom of the page, the way Nan counted her rosary.

When the cage finally came up, Dad stepped out black to the eyebrows, blinking at the gate lamp. He opened his tin and found the paper fairy stuck to his lamp glass, the soot on her silhouette smeared bright where the flame had caught it. He didn't say anything. He just held her up to the light, and I swear the stars I'd drawn at the edge of the page looked as if they had been lit from somewhere underground.