Two tattoo photographs: on the left, a colour Neo-trad style tattoo of a masked spirit with pink flowers and beads on the upper arm; on the right, a black and grey tattoo of soot sprites with a dark

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

No-Face and soot sprite tattoos

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows a colour tattoo of a white-faced masked spirit with pink cheeks, framed by a strand of beads and red blossoms with green leaves, on a shaded peach-toned background. The right panel shows a black and grey tattoo of two round, dark soot sprites with large eyes and thin limbs, with a dark angular shape and small specks scattered across the skin. Both images use bold outlines, and the left has solid fills while the right relies on smooth shading.

Neo-trad Upper arm Back Spirit Flower Bead Soot sprite Eye Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Then the dustlings came up the shaft in the lamp basket, the way they always did when the seam ran thin, and Idris told the boy to hold still, because they can't abide a fidget. They were no bigger than a bramble ball, round and black as a pot bottom, with two pale eyes that blinked slow as a cat's and legs like wet string. They rolled off the basket rim and went straight for the coal dust on the boy's boots, and the boy went white, and his grandfather laughed till he coughed.

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The quiet one came after them, the one with the face like a shut shutter. Nobody in Caerhedyn had ever seen it lift that mask. It walked the drift with a string of wooden beads that clacked against its coat, and wherever it passed a fresh cut face of coal, a blossom opened on the rock, pink as a cheek and red at the heart. The men swore it was the mine's own spirit, and the women said it was only grief dressed up nicely. Idris said it was the dustlings' landlord, and that was the end of the argument.

Tomas tried to keep one. He tipped a sprite into his snap tin and clapped the lid on, and all the way up the lane the tin hummed like a kettle. At the chapel gate he opened it, and the sprite sat on his palm, looked at him with its wet eyes, and seemed to ask what a boy wanted with coal that had never been his. He understood then that they weren't stealing the seam. They were carrying it home.

He set the sprite down on the slag heap, and the next morning the whole black tip was spotted with pink, and the men stood at the gate with their caps off, not sure whether to cry or to dig.