Black and grey photograph of a small tattoo of a white-faced masked spirit with floral details, on the outer upper arm of a person in a white t-shirt.

Masked spirit tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a hooded, faceless spirit figure with a white oval mask and dark robe, surrounded by stylised flowers and a small round shape beneath it. Solid black areas contrast with white negative space in a bold, graphic style. The photograph is black and white, framed on the outer upper arm with a soft, blurred background.

Upper arm Spirit Mask Flower Moon Hood

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, the wet end of October. The lamp at Hollin Bridge has failed again, so I have been stamping papers by the headlights of a lorry that will not stop idling. At 2.14 a figure came up the towpath from the water side, which is not a side anyone uses. Hood up, dark as wet slate, with a pale oval mask for a face, smooth as a pared egg and just as blank. It had no papers. It had a sprig of white flowers, the small kind that grow in the reeds, and it set them on the counter one at a time, as if it were paying.

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Sergeant Okafor would have sent it back. The regulation is clear about persons without documentation. I asked it, in English and then in the Polish I learned from the night shift, where it was going. It tipped its head towards the far bank, where there is nothing but fog and the old mill. Then it took from its sleeve a round grey stone, polished and cool, and held it up to the bulb until the light sat inside it like a moon in a well.

I should have logged it. Instead I wrote the stone in the margin of my notebook, the one with the cracked spine, and pressed the flowers between the pages of the procedures manual where nobody reads. When I looked up the figure had gone, the towpath was only towpath, and the lorry driver was swearing at his dead engine.

Entry, for the record: Purpose of journey, none stated. Carrying, one moon, unopened. Flowers, I have kept them.