Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Gremlin creature with shadow on a calf
Calf · Colour · Photo
A small furry creature with large ears, wide eyes and a pointed nose stands on the lower leg, with its hand raised beside its body. Behind it, a soft grey shadow of a clawed hand falls across the skin. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, using mainly browns, tans and greys with a little warm tone in the eyes.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
You learned early that the engine room on the Marguerite Lowe had a tenant nobody had signed on. The chief blamed it on gremlins, the way other men blamed the weather, and you laughed until the night the port shaft seized somewhere south of the Azores and the only light left was a lamp swinging on its hook.
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It was sitting on the coaming with a spanner in its lap, all ears and wet eyes, turning the bolt as if it had done this job for years. Its shadow climbed the bulkhead behind it, long fingers spread, claws catching the lamplight. You did not move. Nobody aboard had ever seen the thing properly, only its hands and its shadow and the damage it left behind, and you had decided long ago that seeing it outright would mean the ship was finished.
"Don't," it said, in a voice like a kettle thinking about boiling. It raised one small palm, then pointed at the shadow, which was not doing what shadows should. The shadow was waving.
By dawn the shaft was turning. The chief wanted to know who had done it, and you told him the gremlins, and he nodded as though that settled everything. Every night after, you left a biscuit on the grating by the stairs. The grating was always bare by morning, and the shadow on the bulkhead was always one finger further from the wall than the night before.
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