Flash design of a cracked skull wearing a black gas mask, with green smoke curling around it on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in gas mask with green smoke

Colour · Flash

A digital illustration of a human skull wearing a black gas mask with a round mesh filter, shown against a plain white background. Green smoke drifts around the skull and fills the eye sockets and the mask's filter. The skull has soft, glossy shading with fine crack lines, and the mask has bright specular highlights.

Skull Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smoke pots are lit before dawn in the Pendry orchard, and you are the one who carries them down the rows between the Discovery and the old Bramley trees, because your uncle's chest is no good for it now. The mask hangs from your belt by its strap, its filter cap still sealed in the tin. Late August has ripened everything too fast. Wasps stagger in the windfalls, and the air smells of cider with something sour underneath.

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Mr Hollis from the next farm swore the green smoke would kill the canker, the scab and the codlin moth in one go. He bought it from a man in Hereford who never gave his name. Your uncle didn't argue. He only asked you to wear the mask, and you laughed, because who wears a mask to fetch fruit? Now the smoke rolls low between the trunks, thick as wet wool, finding the gaps in the hedge and drifting on towards the lane where the school bus turns.

You strike the last pot near the orchard gate and step back, and suddenly the mask is the only thing that makes sense. You pull it on. The filter grinds and clicks. Through the mesh the world goes green and round, like looking down a well, and the smoke folds itself over the fence posts. Somewhere a dog starts barking at nothing.

By noon the smoke has thinned and the wasps have gone. You take the mask off in the kitchen, where your uncle is peeling apples for a pie he won't eat. He looks at the mask, then at you, and says the trees will be fine. You believe him. You don't tell him you counted the windfalls on the way back, and every one of them was perfect.