Pencil-sketched fairy with detailed wings and flowers in yellow, purple, pink and orange, shown as a botanical tattoo design on a white background.

Fairy with flowers tattoo design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pencil-drawn fairy with large, detailed wings stands in the centre of the image, with a grey dress and flowers in her hair and around her body. Loose, sketched linework shows the figure, and the flowers are shaded in soft yellow, purple, pink and orange. The design is set on a plain white background with the figure filling the frame vertically.

Botanical Fairy Flower Wing Pansy Lily Petal

Find an artist for this

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 pansies on the harbour wall have gone to seed again, and Mrs Tulley is shouting from the chandlery door that someone has been stripping them for dye. You know who. Everyone in Pellow Cove knows who, because the only thing faster than the tide round the breakwater is a fairy with a grudge and a basket of stolen petals.

Keep reading

Esk is perched on the bow rail of the lobster boat Marigold, her grey dress the colour of wet slate, a lily pinned to her shoulder like a medal. She does not look at you. She watches the gulls on the mast, then your empty hands, and sighs the way a kettle does just before it sings. The storm took the letters off the Marigold's transom last week, and she has been collecting the flowers that match them, violet for the M, yellow for the g, pink for the l, because she says a boat without its name is only wood that floats.

You tell her the flowers were never yours to take, and she tells you the boat was never yours to paint, and for a while neither of you moves. Then you hold out your palm, and she counts out the petals one by one, the orange ones last, the way you might count coins for a bad debt. You take a brush from the tin in the net loft and paint the name back in the grey light, the strokes slow, the flowers curling where the letters should be.

At dawn the Marigold slips her moorings with her name shining wet on the stern. Esk is gone from the rail. A single yellow petal is stuck to your sleeve, and when you flick it away it does not fall. It rises over the breakwater, turning in the wind like it has somewhere better to be.