Black and grey fairy tattoo with red-tinted wings and flying birds on the side of the ribs.

Fairy with red-tinted wings and birds

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A fairy with her back to the viewer wears a long, flowing gown and has wind-swept hair, with patterned wings shaded in red. Several small birds fly across a soft, shaded sky to the right. The linework is soft and the figure and dress are built up with grey and black shading, while red is used only on the wings.

Ribs Fairy Wing Bird Dress Hair Flight Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The red panel had cracked again, and Maud Pell was halfway up the iron stairs before the wind finished shouting about it. Below her the sea threw itself at the rocks called the Teeth, and out past them a collier was coming in blind, trusting a lamp that had gone dim at its heart. Maud had no business up there after dark. Her grandfather had kept the light for forty years and never once let a woman past the lantern door, but he was in the churchyard now, and the glass was hers to mind.

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The fairy was waiting in the lamp room, as she always was when storms came, perched on the brass rail with her back to the window as though the sea were no concern of hers. Her gown was the colour of the cloud banks and it streamed sideways in the draught. 'You'll want the spare pane,' she said, not turning round. 'And be quick. The gulls have already left the Teeth, and they never leave for nothing.'

Maud fitted the pane by the flicker of a paraffin wick. The fairy's wings caught the new red light and glowed like embers, and out on the black water a shape swung away from the rocks and began to steer for the harbour mouth. Gulls and terns streamed past the glass in a long grey ribbon, calling, and the fairy rose to follow them into the gale.

Morning came grey and quiet. Maud found a single red-tinged feather caught on the lens frame, fine as a pen nib, and she left it there. The collier's crew never knew how close they had come. Maud only knew that when the beam turned each night after, a little of it fell across the water in a shade that was almost pink, and she had no doubt who had asked for it.