Colour Neo-trad style heart tattoo on a forearm, filled with green patterned background and dark fuzzy sprites with white eyes, edged in pink scallops.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart with soot sprites on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A heart tattoo sits on the forearm, filled with a green patterned background containing three dark, fuzzy round sprites with white eyes. A pink scalloped border outlines the heart, with small purple star-like marks scattered across the green. The bold outlines and saturated colours are shown clearly against the skin, with a blurred indoor background of other flash on the wall.

Neo-trad Forearm Heart Soot sprite Pattern Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sprites came up through the flue the winter the gas was cut off, three of them, black as pitch and round as conkers, and they settled on the warm brick of the old bread oven as if they had signed a lease on it.

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Mrs Hallam said they were a nuisance and a fire risk, and she put a tin of boracic powder on every shelf. By morning the powder was swept into tidy heaps, the ash was raked out of the firebox and the mould had gone from the proving drawer. Nobody ever saw them work. You only saw their white eyes blinking from the dark corners when somebody hummed, and I hummed a lot that winter, because the early shifts are long and the hymns were the only songs I knew all the words to.

In March the bakery sold to a man who wanted it for coffee. Mrs Hallam cried into the flour sacks and then, quite briskly, she cut a heart from a sheet of green oilcloth, edged it with pink lace from her sewing box and pinned it to the wall above the oven. The sprites studied it for a long while. Then, one by one, they rolled down the brick, climbed into the empty bread tin and let me carry them out to the yard.

On the last morning I opened the flue wide, and they floated up it in a slow black knot, past the sooty stars on the bricks, into a sky the colour of cold dough. The oven was cold for the first time in forty years. I left the door ajar so it would not forget them.