Tribal fairy with butterfly wings
Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash
A slender female fairy figure stands in profile with large butterfly wings raised behind her. The design is built from bold black shapes with white negative space, with tribal-style swirls and curling tendrils filling the wings and body. It is a solid black drawing on a plain white background with no colour.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The tide had cut the cliffs at Kessa into spirals, and my grandmother told me every spiral was a door that someone had forgotten to close. I was nine when I first pressed my palm into one and felt the cold draw my hand in, like a breath held by stone. Nobody else in the village would go near the rock after dark, so I went there with a bone needle and a pot of soot, and that is where I met the fairy.
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She stood on the wet ledge in profile, her wings lifted high and split like the ragged dark of a dusk moth. Her feet left no prints in the sand, only curls of wrack. She asked me for a name, and I gave her my brother's, because he had drowned that spring and I could not bear to say it in daylight. She took it the way a gull takes a fish, quickly, and in return she showed me how to cut the swirls so the lines would hold a shadow.
I have spent my life carving her into the clay walls of our houses, the tendrils curling inward from every edge so that she might rest somewhere warm. Each night the patterns deepen a little. My children trace them with their fingers and say the wall feels warm, and I do not tell them why.
When the tide comes in now, the white spaces in the rock fill first. I know she is standing at the edge of the wall with one foot lifted, deciding whether to come back for the rest of her price.
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