Traditional flash drawing of a plague doctor mask with a black top hat, round glasses and a red hatband, with handwritten script beneath.

Plague doctor mask flash with script

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A black and white flash sheet drawing of a plague doctor mask, with a beaked snout, round eyeglasses, a top hat and a small red accent on the hatband. Bold black outlines and solid fills dominate, with a small amount of grey shading on the beak. Handwritten script sits in the lower left, and partial drawings of other designs are visible at the edges of the sheet.

Traditional Mask Top hat Beak Glasses Script Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doctor came up the lane at dusk, the way the fever did, slowly at first and then all at once. Ada Pell saw the black hat over the hedge before anyone else and ran in without her boots, shouting that the crow was here.

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I was the one sent to the well with the bucket. I heard boots on the stones behind me and turned, and there it was: the long beak stuffed with dried rosemary and camphor, the round glass eyes catching the last light like pond ice. The red ribbon on the hatband had gone pale with weather. It bowed to me, which nobody had ever done, and asked after my mother by name.

Inside, it went straight to the cradle by the hearth without asking where it was. It knelt, drew the wad of cloth from its beak with two gloved fingers, and I saw the gloves were shaking. It counted the candles on the mantel out loud, then counted the children, and when it reached four it stopped and said the number again, quieter, the way my grandfather said the names of the dead at the table.

Before it left at first light, it pressed a tin of barley sugar into my palm and told me to keep the bucket full. At the gate I found the red ribbon tied to the post, freshly knotted, and the lane empty as far as the trees. The fever broke that morning. I still keep the ribbon in the drawer with the good spoons, and I have never once seen the crow come back for it.