Flash-style design of a white masked spirit face with red streaks, set in black ink splatter with dripping lines, shown on a plain white background.

Masked spirit in ink splatter

Mixed · Flash

A white, expressionless mask with two dark eyes and red streaks sits at the centre of the design. Heavy black ink splatter and drips surround and spill down beneath the mask, with small dark specks scattered around the edges. The plain white background makes the solid black shapes and the small magenta accents on the mask stand out clearly.

Mask Spirit Ink splatter Drip Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Wednesday the mask came into the print shop, the black had been sitting in its tins since Monday and nobody had thought to stir it. You were seventeen and the only one who came in before the foreman, so the back door was yours to unlock. Rain had stopped on the high street. The bell over the door did not ring. The visitor simply stood in the lamplight, a pale oval face no bigger than a dinner plate, two dark hollows for eyes and a red smear down each cheek, as if it had been weeping in the wet.

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It did not speak. It held out an open hand, and when you put the tin into it, it tipped the whole thing over its own shoulder. The ink did not spill so much as climb. It went up the walls in long dark fingers, down the type cabinets, over the stacked broadsides for the parish fête, until the room was as black as a well and the soot sprites from the drains came crowding up to the lamp to see what the commotion was.

You set the type that night because it asked for nothing else. Letter by letter, backwards, the way Mr Lusk had taught you, until your thumbs were grey to the knuckle. When the proof came off the bed it was a single line, and you did not read it aloud. The mask folded it twice and tucked it into the dark where a sleeve should have been, and the ink drew back off the walls like a tide going out.

By morning the shop was clean and the press was dry. Only the notice pinned at the chapel door had changed. The fête, the bell ringers, the price of coal were all as they had been, and at the foot of the sheet, in a face of type you had never set, sat a small black drop that had dried in the shape of a question mark.