Two colour neo-traditional heart tattoos on a lower leg, one showing an anime girl with two cats and the other a white creature with soot sprites.

Anime heroine and cats beside soot sprite hearts

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two heart-shaped tattoos sit side by side on a lower leg. The left heart shows an anime-style girl with hair buns and two cats, one white and one purple, framed by flowers and a teal bow. The right heart shows a white cartoon creature with soot sprites and a small bird-like figure on a teal background with stars, also framed by flowers and a pink bow. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fill make up the linework and shading, with a pink and teal palette.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You wake to the knock of the lock gates and find the stove already gone cold, which means the sprites have been at the coal again. They sit in the bilge like black fluff in a tin, a dozen of them, blinking their big white eyes at you as if you owe them rent. Biscuit, the white cat, is perched on the tiller with her ears flat, and Vesper, the purple one with a crescent moon on her collar, has her paw in the kettle.

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Your aunt Ottoline left you the boat and the debts that came with it, and the sprites came with the boat too, or so the bargemen at Hollin Lock swear. Nobody sweeps them out. They only leave when the engine runs hot enough to make them restless, and then they climb into the brass chimney and ride the smoke up over the water meadows. You have never been brave enough to watch them go, only to hear their small wheezing laughter from the roof.

Today Dumpling, the pale round creature in the bow, is sulking because Gristle, the jay with the wild tufts, has eaten the last of the toffee. You light the stove anyway. The sprites tumble out of the bilge in a black cloud and roll up the cabin steps, and you hold the coal sack open at the top of the hatch. One by one they drop in, clicking like marbles, until the sack hums against your hip.

At the next village the lamplighter is waiting on the towpath with a ladder and no matches. When you tip the sack over the rail, the sprites spill into the lamps and stay there, glowing gold. The boat lifts under you, lighter than it has been in years. Vesper yawns, Biscuit leaps down onto the towpath, and you realise the boat was never full at all. It was only waiting for someone to open the hatch.

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