Colour tattoo of a red-haired fairy with blue and green butterfly wings, surrounded by stars and small butterflies, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fairy with butterfly wings on upper back

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A red-haired fairy sits in the centre of the design with large blue and green butterfly wings, and smaller green, pink and orange butterflies and dragonflies are scattered around her. Dark outlines define the figure and wings, with soft colour shading in the wings and hair. Small black dot stars fill the surrounding space, and the composition spreads across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Back Shoulder Fairy Butterfly Dragonfly Star Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sorrel had patched the same blue wing three times before the frost arrived, and each time the dragonflies complained that she was wasting the good dew. She sat on the sill of the old mill with a thimble of spider silk in her lap, stitching while the stars came out one by one over the weir. Below her, the miller's wife was carrying a lantern down through the orchard, calling for the ewes that had wandered off again.

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Every spring the wood lent its colours to the fairy folk, green for the new leaves, orange for the late foxgloves, and every autumn someone had to come round with the tally. Sorrel had been given the ledger because she was the only one who could count past seven without her wings humming. The debts were small and she kept them neat: one rust-brown wash for a dying fern, a pinch of violet from a bruised plum. Her own wings were mostly borrowed too, and she knew it, which was why she mended them so carefully.

The lantern guttered out at the bottom of the orchard, and the miller's wife stood among the apple trees in the dark, quite still. Sorrel sent the dragonflies down with what starlight she could spare, and the little green butterflies went ahead to show the way home. When the ewes were counted and the lamp was lit again, the wife stood at the gate and asked what she owed.

"Nothing," said Sorrel, "yet."

By morning the orchard was green again, and in the ledger, under the day's entry, she wrote in her neat hand: paid in full. Then, smaller, she added a question mark, and went back to her stitching.