Pencil sketch of a small fairy seated with tall, swept wings and curling flourishes, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketch of a fairy with wings

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a small seated fairy with long hair and sweeping, tapering wings that curl at their tips. Trailing swirls and a loose circular outline sit behind the figure, and loose sketch lines show the drawing process. The image is in greyscale on a plain off-white background, with the composition filling the upper and central area of the page.

Fine line Fairy Wing Swirl Sketch

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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

Sit yourself down on the coal sacks, love, the kettle's nearly boiled. You'll have heard of the pencil fairy of Thornbury Lock? No? Then you've not wintered on the cut. She came up from the weir the spring the flood took my uncle's tiller, perched on a heron's back, or so the lock-keeper swore, and he was never a liar, only a drinker. Nobody saw her face. They saw her sitting on the lock wall with her knees drawn up, drawing.

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She drew with a stub of carpenter's pencil on the whitewash, every night, the boats coming through. Narrowboats, working barges, the Mary Ellen with her blue roses. Each one she sketched in a few quick lines, and her wings went up behind them in long tapering strokes that curled at the tips like the ends of a fern. She never finished a single one. The moon she drew as a loose ring, and she'd leave it bare, every time, as if she was saving the shading for somebody else.

Nell Garside was nine and pig-headed, and she waited up one night with a candle to catch the fairy at it. When the pencil came to the moon, Nell reached out and rubbed a thumb across the circle, just once, to see what would happen. The fairy looked up. Her hair fell down the wall like river weed. Then she laughed, quiet as a dropped spoon, and went back to her drawing without a word.

In the morning the wall was bare, the whitewash scrubbed by the rain. But the lock-keeper says the swirls are still there if you know where to look, pale in the wood grain, and the moon is still a ring with nothing inside it. Fetch me that tin of tea, love. The Mary Ellen's coming through the gates now, and I'd like to see if she's painted the roses on yet.