Black ink drawing of a figure wearing a balaclava with white eye and mouth openings, holding a cigarette with smoke rising from it, on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Balaclava figure smoking, ink drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black ink drawing shows a figure in a balaclava with white cut-out eyes and a mouth opening. A hand with long nails holds a cigarette, and a thin wisp of smoke curls up to the left. The solid black mask contrasts with fine outlined linework on the eyes, hand and smoke against a plain white background.

Figure Cigarette Smoke Hand Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, you lot, and mind the kettle, because this is the winter the lane froze solid and Ada Pryce came down it at two in the morning with her face wrapped in black wool. Everybody at Hollin Farm knew that knitted mask. It was her father's, and it had kept him warm on the tops for forty years, so when she came through the yard gate with a torch dimmed to nothing, the dogs did not even bark. They only lay down in the straw and sighed.

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She had come for the money in the biscuit tin under the dresser. That was the whole plan. But the kitchen light was on, and in it sat old Thomas Bell with his boots off and a cigarette cupped in his palm the way men held them against the wind. He did not get up. He did not reach for the poker. He looked at the wool over her mouth and said, "Your dad breathed like that when he was nervous. Sit down before you fog the window."

So she sat. She rolled the cigarette he offered from his own tin, pushed the mask up over her nose, and the smoke went straight up past the lamp like a thin grey wire. They did not speak of the tin. They talked about the ewes, the price of feed, and whether the Harrow boy would ever come back from the city.

When the sky turned the colour of dishwater, Thomas stood, pulled on his boots, and dropped a coin in the tin himself. "For the lane," he said. Ada pulled the mask down again and went out into the frost, and the last thing the farm saw was a small curl of smoke rising over the wall, as if someone had forgotten to put it out.