Fine line watercolour tattoo of a fairy with outstretched wings on a lower leg, with blue, green, orange and peach washes.

Watercolour fairy on a lower leg

Fine line · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A fairy in a flowing green dress is drawn in black fine linework with long, sheer wings and a bun of hair. Loose watercolour washes in blue, green, orange and peach fill the wings, dress and body, with splashes spreading beyond the outline. The figure sits diagonally across the limb with the wings extending upward to the left.

Fine line Calf Fairy Wing Dress Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the range and mind the coal scuttle, love, because I'm about to tell you what my grandmother told me, and she never once lied about the pit. The Harker shaft had been dry for a hundred years when the water came back up through it, and the men went down with lamps to pump, and that's when the green light started showing at the bottom of the workings.

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It was no bigger than a sparrow's heart, and it wore a dress the colour of new bracken that never took a speck of soot, not once. Old Tom Pryce swore it had wings as thin as wet tissue, with a blue you could see straight through, like the sky over the reservoir in May. It hung about the cage where the canaries sat, and the birds sang louder whenever it came near.

Then in February the roof came down at the east face, and eleven men were trapped on the far side of the fall. The rescue crews dug for three days and found nothing but rock. On the fourth morning Pryce's boy, nine years old and sneaked down the ladder with a bread cob in his pocket, came up the shaft shouting that the fairy had shown him a gap no wider than a letter box. He couldn't say how he'd followed it. He only knew the light had hung in the dust like a dropped ribbon, and he'd gone where it went.

They brought all eleven out by the Friday. Nobody asked the boy how he knew where to dig, and nobody asked the fairy anything at all. But every spring after, a splash of fresh green bloomed on the pithead wall where the paint had flaked, and my grandmother set a saucer of milk on the step. Whatever you do, don't you dare wipe it off.