Colour and black-line tattoo of four fluffy soot sprites with big white eyes holding small green, pink and orange stars, placed on the shoulder.

Four soot sprites with coloured stars on a shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

Four small, fluffy black soot sprites with large white eyes and thin stick legs are arranged across the skin, each one holding or sitting near a small star in green, pink or orange. The linework is simple and cartoon-like, with the black fur shaded in soft grey and the stars filled with flat colour. The sprites are staggered in a diagonal across the upper back and shoulder, with the largest on the left and the smallest on the right, against pale skin and a blurred background of blue hair.

Shoulder Soot sprite Star Creature Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, you lot, and mind the draught from the back door, because this is the bit about the soot that nobody at Harrowgate Primary ever believed. Forty years on, Mrs Penhallow still swears it happened the week the boiler packed in. The old school hall was so cold that the coats steamed, and somewhere up in the rafters, where the dust had been gathering since the Coronation, the soot began to stir.

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There were four of them, the way there are always four in these stories. Small black puffs with big white eyes that looked surprised at everything, and thin stick legs that wobbled when they walked. They had come down the flue, so the tale goes, looking for somewhere warm and somewhere that needed sweeping, and they found the Year Five coat pegs. Each one had taken a star off the classroom cardboard display, the green one, the pink one and two orange ones, and they carried them about as though the stars were lanterns and they were late for something important.

Most of the children ran. Young Dennis Ashby did not. He sat on the radiator with a jam sandwich and offered the biggest sprite half of it, and the sprite, very solemnly, handed him the pink star in return. Dennis kept it in his pencil case until the day he died, and his daughter has it now, which is why I can tell you the colour hasn't faded a bit.

So when the reunion gets to the photographs tonight, look at the star-holders carefully. Some folk swear the little ones are always a step behind the others, the way they were that winter, trailing a bit at the back of the crowd. And if you find a stray orange star in your coat pocket on the way home, don't throw it out. Somebody in that hall once gave a sprite a fair trade, and the sprites remember.