Fairy Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a fairy tattoo means

Before they were small and pretty, fairies were feared. In Irish and Scottish folklore they were the Good People or the Good Neighbours, named politely so as not to give offence, and they stole children, led travellers astray and punished anyone who cut down a lone hawthorn they claimed. The word itself came through Old French faerie, enchantment, from the Latin fata, the Fates, so at its root a fairy is someone who decides what happens to you.

Shakespeare shrank them. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, written around 1595, the elves creep into acorn cups to hide, and Mercutio's Queen Mab is no bigger than an agate stone on an alderman's finger. Later painters added insect wings and flowers to sleep in, and the fairy became a picture of nature at its most delicate. Most of the designs here come from that second line: a fairy stepping out of a peony, asleep in a tulip, kneeling on a leaf with a dewdrop, or drifting off on a single dandelion seed.

Worn now, the figure usually means one of three things. Wonder kept past childhood, often by someone raised on fairy stories; a closeness to gardens, woods and small living things, which is what the flower fairies say; or the wilder older fairy, independent and not entirely safe, which the moth-winged dark fairy in dotwork and the young guard with his thorn spear lean towards. The tooth fairy flying off with a tooth in her arms is its own case, and nearly always a tattoo about a child.

The wings are not decoration. Butterfly wings make her a creature of daylight and colour, moth wings a creature of the night, and long clear dragonfly wings make her quick and a little unearthly, so choose the insect for what you want her to be before you choose a style.

Where the design comes from

Wings are rare in the folklore itself, where fairies flew by magic or astride a stem of ragwort; painters supplied them, and by the Victorian period the tiny winged figure was standard. Richard Dadd painted The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke between 1855 and 1864 while confined at Bethlem Hospital, and W. B. Yeats gathered the Irish stories in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888. In 1917 two cousins at Cottingley in Yorkshire photographed paper cut-outs of fairies, Arthur Conan Doyle published the pictures as genuine in 1920, and the cousins admitted the trick only in 1983. Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Spring, in 1923, gave every plant a fairy of its own, the tradition the peony, tulip and dandelion fairies here belong to.

Choosing yours

• Pick the wings for the size. Dragonfly wings are a net of fine veins that fill in as the ink spreads, so below about 8 cm they should be left open with only an outline, as on the blackwork silhouette and the single-line fairy here. Butterfly wings hold small if they are patterned in a few bold panels rather than fine scales.
• Decide whether she needs a face. Under about 6 cm her features are a few millimetres across and blur first, which is why the smallest designs here turn her away: seen from behind on the crescent moon, in solid silhouette, or drawn in one line.
• Know what the Celtic fairy is. Knotwork comes from Insular manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, made around 800, and has no link to fairy lore, so the pairing here is modern.

Common questions