Fine line black tattoo of a faceless spirit with a small heart on the fingers of a hand, with red painted nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Faceless spirit and small heart on a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black outline tattoo of a round, faceless white spirit sits on the back of a hand, with a tiny outlined heart on the finger below it. The linework is thin and even, with simple solid black marks for the eyes and mouth and no shading. The photo is taken close up against a dark patterned fabric with floral details at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Hand Spirit Mask Heart Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father swears the thing came up the shaft on the morning cage, the one that rattles at ten to six, standing in the corner beneath the lamp hooks. He says it had no face to speak of, only a round white nothing with two black dashes where the eyes should be, and that it walked up the lane to Carrow Dene as meek as a lamb. You have heard him tell it a hundred times at the kitchen table, and each time the story gains a detail, the way men do when coal dust gets into their stories as well as their lungs.

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You are twelve and you keep the tally board at the pit gate, so nobody notices you until the spirit does. It waits by the wash-house every evening, humming as if it is trying to recall a tune, and when the men come up grey-faced it turns towards each of them without any hurry. You begin leaving it things: the heel of a loaf, a boiled sweet, the brown paper your mother wraps sandwiches in. It takes them without a mouth you can see, and the two black dashes seem to soften at the edges.

In February the cage jams at four hundred feet with your father and eleven others inside. The whole village comes to the gate, and the spirit comes too, and stands at your shoulder so quietly that the women stop wailing to look at it. Nobody can say how long you wait. You take the chalk stub from the tally board and draw a small heart on the iron railing, the way your mother marks the pantry door when a shift is safely home.

At dawn the cage rings up with your father sitting in it, black to the eyebrows and furious at the fuss. When you turn round, the spirit has gone. On the iron, beside your chalk heart, someone has pressed two small dark marks, one on each side, like a face that has decided to listen.