Realistic colour tattoo of a plague doctor mask and black hat with green smoke on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Plague doctor mask on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A photograph of a shaded tattoo on a man's upper arm showing a plague doctor mask with a wide-brimmed black hat, round glass eyepieces and a long beaked snout. A gloved hand holding a small vial or lantern sits below the mask. The mask is rendered in greys and metallic tones with smooth blended shading, set against swirling green smoke that fills the background.

Realism Upper arm Mask Hat Smoke Glove Lantern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways off Tanners' Row since before the bells, and by the time Doctor Ansel Crewe set his trestle under the awning the cobbles ran like pewter. He never lifted the beaked mask for the weather. Forty years of wearing it had worn a dent into the leather above his brow, and the wax-stiff hat creaked whenever he bent to a jar. I stood at his elbow with the ledger, counting coins the rain kept trying to wash off the page.

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Each evening he burned a pinch of rue and dried sage in the brass bowl, and the smoke rose green where he had stirred in copper salts from a jar nobody else was permitted to open. Folk came to buy it for their doorposts and their sickbeds. They came too to stand a little closer to the glass eyes and ask whether the long nose really kept the bad air out. He always said it kept the questions out, which made them laugh, and laughing, they bought more.

On the third morning a girl of perhaps nine pushed through the crowd with a farthing clenched in a wet fist and asked for the smallest vial. Her mother, she said, would not stop coughing. The doctor took a glass stopper from the shelf with his gloved fingers and held it a long moment before he gave it to her. "Water and smoke," he told me afterwards, wiping the lenses with a rag. "Mostly the smoke."

That evening I watched the girl come back for a second vial and go off again through the rain, holding it up before her like a lantern. Green light trembled over the cobbles behind her, and the doctor, with his hand still raised from the shelf, said nothing at all.