Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a plague doctor in a beaked mask and top hat, holding a smoking candle in a skeletal hand, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Plague doctor with smoking candle on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A plague doctor figure wears a beaked bird mask with round eye lenses and a wide-brimmed top hat, with a draped, folded cloak covering the upper body. The figure grips a candle in a bony hand, with wisps of smoke curling up beside the head. Shading is built from fine stippling and etched hatching in black and grey, with a dark, empty background behind the figure.

Dotwork Forearm Top hat Cloak Candle Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Hollin kept the walled garden behind the almshouse, and every spring she gave the new boy the same warning: leave the north gate barred after dark, whatever knocks. The boy was called Tam and he had more curiosity than sense, so on the first warm night of April, when the knocking came, he lifted the bar to see.

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A tall figure stood on the gravel with a candle in one bony hand. The candle was lit, though no wind reached it, and a grey thread of smoke rose from it and curled past the figure's head. Its beak was as long as a trowel and its round glass eyes caught the moon. It asked, in a voice like wet leather, for the wild corner where nothing had been planted. Tam said that corner was no use to anyone, and the figure seemed pleased by this answer.

"Then blow out my light," it said, "and I will take only what nobody tends."

Tam bent and blew. The smoke did not thin but went on rising, long after the flame was gone. The figure turned and walked back through the gate. In the morning the nettles, the bramble and the old crooked rose by the wall were gone to bare earth, yet the beans and onions Tam had sown with his own hands stood green and untouched.

Mother Hollin walked the bare corner in her boots, looked at the clean earth for a long while, and then handed him a packet of seed. "Well," she said. "Now you'll have to plant something there."