Black and grey dotwork tattoo on an upper arm in a circular frame, showing a boy in a suit watching a hand shadow puppet cast on a wall beside a candle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Boy watching a hand shadow on an arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A boy in a suit and short hair sits at a table beside a lit candle and stack of books, gazing at a hand shadow puppet that resembles a horned creature with long ears. The boy and candle are drawn with fine outline and solid black areas, while the shadow is built from dense stippled dots that fade toward the edges. The design sits inside a thin black circle on pale skin, with a partial bat-like wing visible at the upper right.

Dotwork Upper arm Candle Book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday. Master Edwin would not go up until he had shown me the goat again, so I sat on the hard chair by the schoolroom table while he lit the stub of candle and propped his atlas against the cocoa tin. He lifted his right hand into the light, folded the thumb under, and let two fingers stand up like a hare's ears. On the wall the thing rose as tall as the door. I told him that goats do not have such ears. He said this one was not a goat. It was Mr Hobbs, who keeps the sexton's key and does not care to be looked at.

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The shadow was never quite still. Where the candle guttered, its edges crumbled into a fine grey dust, as though the plaster were being peppered with soot, and I could not tell whether it was the flame or the boy's breath that made it shiver. Cook says the house has been full of smuts since the frost. Clara, who is six and sleeps across the landing, has taken to pulling her pillow over her head whenever the light shows under the door.

I decided, sternly, that the whole business was a game. Edwin blew out the candle and laughed, and I went to fetch my shawl. When I looked back from the threshold the shadow had not gone. It hung on the wall with its long ears lying flat, and the dust along its back was turning slowly, like a congregation settling in a cold pew.

This morning the candle was a neat white cup of wax, the atlas was back on its shelf, and Edwin was asleep with one hand curled on the blanket. Above his bed, in the thin grey light, the paint held the print of a hand, fingers spread and pressed flat, as if something had been waiting all night for a quiet enough room in which to listen.