Traditional style flash drawing of a horned Krampus creature with a bundle of birch switches and a basket holding a child's legs, against sparkling stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Krampus carrying a basket with a child's legs

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A horned, black-furred Krampus figure with red eyes and a lolling tongue carries a large orange woven basket on its back, with a pair of child's legs in dark shoes sticking out of the top. It holds a bundle of yellow and orange switches in one hand and has a long curling tail, with four-point stars and dots scattered around the figure. The design uses bold black outlines and solid black fills with orange, yellow and red accents on a plain off-white background.

Traditional Demon Horn Basket Star Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pilling's boarders had gone up by nine, all except Tobias Greave, who was eleven and had been sent to the scullery for the third time that week for pinching the cold custard. I found him there at half past nine with a spoon in his fist and a look of pure contentment, which lasted until the back gate rattled.

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My grandmother had kept a birch switch behind the larder door for exactly this, and I took it down now, though my hand would not keep still. The thing that filled the yard was taller than the wash-house roof. Black fur crusted with salt, two curling horns gone orange at the tips like the ends of a bonfire, and a tongue that lolled out over its chin. A woven basket sat on its back, big enough for a coal scuttle, and from the top of it stuck a pair of small legs in dark school shoes, kicking slowly, as though keeping time with the sea.

"Custard," it said, in a voice like a drawer of cutlery being tipped out. "And sums not done, and a dog kicked in Cromer last March." Tobias began to cry. I said he would be good, that I would see to him myself, and the creature looked at me for a long while before it tapped its bundle of switches against its palm. The sound was like rain on a tin roof.

It did not take the boy. It took the spoon from his fist, licked it clean, and dropped it in the basket with a clatter. Then it leapt the wall in one bound and went off across the dunes with the stars coming out above it, one after another, like someone was pressing them into the dark with a thumb. In the morning Tobias came down to breakfast with washed hands and a clean collar, and nobody could say what had happened to the custard. Above the tideline there were four neat star-shaped prints in the sand, and I never saw them wash away.