Colour tattoo on an ankle showing a masked faceless spirit above a smiling orange fire sprite, with pink and red flowers and leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Faceless spirit and fire sprite on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A bright colour tattoo on the outside of an ankle shows a faceless masked spirit with red cheek markings, rising beside a smiling yellow and orange flame sprite with large round eyes. Pink and red flowers and leaves trail up the leg, and the spirit's dark body shades into deep purple and black. The soft-edged, painterly shading sits against a blurred orange background.

Ankle Flame Flower Leaves Mask

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last coach had gone over the bridge at ten past two, and the booth at Quarry Lock was supposed to be empty after that. Instead there was a figure standing on the white line in the rain, tall as the barrier and wearing a mask as blank as a bowl. I slid the hatch open an inch. It did not speak. It held out a pressed red leaf, veined like a map, then a second, then a third, until the counter was covered with them.

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My instructions were clear about travellers with no papers and no name. I reached for the stamp, and the brass lamp on my desk, the one Mrs Okafor left behind when she retired, flared up on its own. Out bounced a fire sprite, all grin and startled round eyes, skidding across the ledger and scorching the corner of the form. 'Oi,' it said, in a voice like a kettle coming to the boil, 'he's been waiting since the thaw. Stamp the leaf, you daft lump.'

I stamped the leaf. The ink came up a deep plum, the colour of a bruise going down, and the figure bowed so low the rain ran off its mask in threads. It pressed a single pink blossom into my palm, warm as a coal, and walked off along the wet road without a footstep I could hear. The sprite rolled back into the lamp, grumbling about draughts.

In the morning the supervisor found the ledger blackened at one corner and a petal stuck to the stamp pad, and asked who had been on the booth. I told him nobody. I kept the petal in my top pocket all week. It never once went brown at the edges, and the lamp still flickers whenever someone on nights says they have no papers.