Colour tattoo on a forearm showing a pink frosted cupcake with three black fuzzy soot sprites and scattered pink, teal and orange stars in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cupcake and soot sprites on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a pink frosted cupcake in a teal liner on a stand, with three fuzzy black soot sprites with large round eyes and scattered pink, teal and orange stars around them. The outlines are bold and dark, with solid fills and small areas of shading on the sprites and frosting. Colour is bright and saturated against the pale skin, and the motifs are arranged across the forearm with open space between them.

Neo-trad Forearm Cupcake Soot sprite Star Frosting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, you'll wake the others. No, the lights don't flicker for nothing, that's the soot sprites doing their rounds. Three of them, down in the boiler room under the old west wing, where it's warm enough to keep a sprite contented. They've no proper names. Mr Fenwick, the porter before me, called them Smudge, Tuppence and the Other One, and they've a weakness for two things: sugar and falling stars.

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Now the night baker on Ward Nine, Agnes, she'd leave a pink-iced cupcake on the hatch every night in a teal paper case, set on a lace doily, by way of thanks for keeping the pipes from knocking. Nobody ever saw the sprites eat it. But come morning the case would be bare, and little paper stars would be scattered across the lino like confetti after a wedding.

The winter the girl in Bay Four couldn't sleep, the sprites came up the lift shaft. One was hauling a cake twice its own size, and another had three stars clutched in its fuzzy arms, wearing them on its head like a hat, which is no way for a sprite to behave. They sat on the end of her bed, all three, watching her with those enormous eyes until her breathing slowed and her hands unclenched from the blanket.

When the day shift came on, the cupcake was gone and there was one star left on her pillow, still warm, with a faint taste of frosting when she touched it to her lip. Now, if you're asking whether that was the sprites, or Agnes, or the nurse who came round at four with a torch, well, you'll have to decide that for yourself. Go on, close your eyes.