Black soot sprite with large white eyes and small pink, orange and teal stars, a cartoon-style tattoo on the inner wrist with the palm raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Soot sprite and stars on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black, fuzzy soot sprite with large white eyes and an orange star at its centre, with smaller pink, orange and teal stars scattered beside it. The sprite is solid black with spiky edges, while the stars provide the only colour. The photograph is a close view of the wrist and raised palm against a plain pale wall.

Forearm Soot sprite Star Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sprites came down the chimney the week the boiler was condemned, which Mr Abernethy said was the first honest thing that flue had done since 1961. Nell found them in the coal scuttle at six in the morning, a dozen black puffs with white saucer eyes, blinking up at her as if she were the one who had arrived late.

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They were no trouble at first. They liked cold ash and the warm side of the kettle, and they hopped across the lino in a rattling, purposeful way, like marbles that had learnt manners. Her gran, who had lived in the house for fifty years, said they always turned up when a house was about to change hands. Nell kept them in an old biscuit tin with the lid punched for air and gave them the paper stars her sister had sent from Whitby, pink and orange and a teal that never quite dried.

By March the tin was too small and the sprites had grown thinner, greyer at the edges. Gran's saying turned out to be half true. On the night the last coal burned down to a red eye, Nell carried the tin up the ladder onto the flat roof. The sprites climbed out one by one, and each pressed a star to its own black fur before leaping, the way you might pin a brooch on before a wedding. They rose over the chimney pots like sparks that had forgotten how to fall. The smallest one stopped at the rim of the tin and looked back at her, then went after the others, and the empty lid kept rattling in the wind long after the sky had swallowed them.