Colour tattoo of an anime-style girl in a red top with small black soot sprites on a forearm, resting on a studio chair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anime girl and soot sprites on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an anime-style girl with a brown bob haircut and a red top, seen from the waist up with a light blue cloud-like background behind her. Three round black soot sprites with large eyes sit above her, drawn in clean, uniform linework. The colour is smooth and flat with soft shading on the hair and clothing, and the composition runs up the forearm.

Forearm Girl Soot sprite Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The soot sprites came up through the boiler grate the night the Ferrowick Road tram depot lost its power, three of them, round as conkers, each with eyes that blinked on their own schedule and a fringe of black bristle. I was the only one on the late shift who didn't scream. Mr Dunmore had told me to sweep the pit and never look at what lived under the cinders, and I had never been good at doing as I was told.

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They didn't bite. They rolled into my bootlaces and tugged at the hem of my red jumper as if it were a question. One of them lifted a tram ticket from my coat pocket and sat on it like a hen on an egg. The other two climbed the ladder to the signal box and set about picking rust off lever number four with great seriousness, as though a train were waiting on them.

At two o'clock the lights flickered and the line hummed back to life. The sprites slid into the cracks of the brickwork in a little grey cloud, and the ticket in my hand had gone warm and printed itself with the words Ferrowick, Single, Nowhere in Particular. When I checked the timetable the next morning, no route on the network carried that name.

I still walk down to the depot every Thursday at quarter to midnight, and I still carry a spare ticket in my pocket, just in case the sprites want a ride home.