Black and grey drawing of a seated fairy with dark shaded wings, a curled swirl tail and flowers at the base, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seated fairy with shaded wings

Black and grey · Flash

A seated fairy with long flowing hair rests her chin on her hand, knees drawn up, with large wings shaded in heavy black and grey. Delicate outline linework is combined with soft grey shading on the body and dark tonal areas on the wings, and a curling swirl trails from the lower left. Three flowers sit at the bottom right, and the design is set on a plain pale background with a black border.

Fairy Wing Flower Hair Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit you down, the kettle's only just gone off, and mind the cat on the coal scuttle. Aye, that's the Marigold, or what's left of her. Fifty year I hauled coal and bricks up the Stour on her, and I'll tell you what my father told me, that every barge on the cut has a fairy aboard if you're lucky enough to be too slow to see her.

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Her name was Nettle, or that's what the lock-keeper's girl called her, because she'd never sit still on a hook or a bollard. She came up out of the bindweed on the towpath at Kidderminster the summer the water ran low, settled herself on the gunwale with her knees drawn under her chin, and watched us work the lock as if we were a play put on for her benefit. Her wings were grey as a kettle lid at dusk, dark at the edges where the rain had got into them, and she never once lifted them while we could see.

Bit by bit the trouble came. The Marigold's rudder jammed in the weir race, and my brother Ray swore it was weed, but Nettle was perched on the tiller with her hair trailing in the water, and when I reached for her she laughed like a stone skipping and the rudder came free. She left three morning-glory blooms curled round the tiller arm, the way she left flowers wherever she'd sat.

I never did learn what she wanted. But every spring after, a blossom turned up in the coal hold, pressed flat under the hatch, and I left the hatch open a crack for her. Ray says that's superstition. He's welcome to it, and to the tiller, which he never once got to run true.