Colour tattoo of Dobby the house elf holding a striped sock, with candles, a moon and a castle silhouette, on the outer thigh.

Dobby the house elf on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows Dobby the house elf with large ears and wide eyes, holding a red and white striped sock, wrapped in a tan cloth. Flanking him are two lit candles, a full moon and a dark castle silhouette, and a scroll banner at the bottom reads FREE. The bold outlines and shading are combined with bright colours including yellow, purple, pink and turquoise on a pale background.

Neo-trad Thigh Candle Moon Castle Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in the house of Irrenmere had seen the kitchen-thing sit down in forty years, so when Lady Ottoline came down at midnight and found it crouched by the cold hearth, clutching a striped stocking to its chest, she assumed it had broken something and was waiting to be scolded.

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The thing was called Pim, though only because Ottoline's great-grandmother had once asked its name and been answered with a long silence. It had served the castle since before the walls were whitewashed. It polished the silver, lit the two tall candles in the long gallery each dusk, and kept the moon's slow tally in its head, counting the nights between one full moon and the next. It owned one tan cloth, knotted at the shoulder, and nothing else at all.

"It is the full moon," Pim said. Its voice was like a dry leaf moving over stone. "The old law holds that a servant given clothes by its master's own hand is no longer a servant. I have waited a long time for someone in this house to be careless with a sock."

Ottoline laughed, then did not. She fetched a stocking from the laundry basket, its red and white stripes faded by a hundred washings, and knelt on the flags to draw it over the creature's long grey foot. Pim trembled. The candles guttered in the draught from the chimney. Beyond the window the black towers stood against a sky the colour of old turquoise glass, and the moon hung above them like a coin nobody wanted to spend.

Pim rose, tugged the cloth straight, and walked to the door without looking back. At the threshold it stopped and wrote a single word in the dust of the flagstone, large enough that Ottoline could read it from where she knelt: FREE. Then it was gone down the hill, and the candles burned on in the empty gallery.