Fine line tattoo of a black soot sprite with big round eyes and a small blue star on its head, placed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Soot sprite with blue star on the forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small cartoon soot sprite, a round black fuzzy body with spiky edges, two large white eyes and thin stick limbs, is tattooed on the inner forearm. A small blue star sits on top of the sprite, and the fine outlines are drawn in a single thin black line. The sprite is centred on pale skin against a plain background, with the wrist edge visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Soot sprite Star Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the hatch, it's sticky, and don't lean on the bunker rail, the coal's got opinions. Right, you want the sprites? Everyone wants the sprites. On the Mary Ellen Doyle, out of Liverpool in the winter of nineteen-oh-nine, we had forty-one days of open water between us and Valparaiso, and the bunkers were full of little black things nobody had ordered.

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They rode the coal up from the Welsh pits, fuzzy as burnt toast, with eyes like lamp glass and legs no thicker than a match. Tobias Crane, the second engineer, swore he'd shovel the lot into the sea. But one night on the stoke-hole grating I saw a sprite with a blue star perched on its head, a star cut from a bit of bottle glass. It sat there calm as a parson while the boilers roared, and when the ship's compass swung wild from all that iron, it turned its big eyes north and held them there. I was a boy, Dai Hoskins, eighteen and daft, and I followed where it looked.

Then the Horn came up at us. Green water over the rail, the wheel gone slack, and the lamps out on the chains. The sprites went up those chains like sparks going the wrong way, dozens of them, and none would come down. But the star sprite walked slow along the chain to the binnacle and sat on the glass, right over the card, so its light lay across the needle. I read our heading by that small blue glow for six hours, hand on the wheel, salt in my teeth, until the wind laid down.

We raised Valparaiso on a grey morning. The bunkers were empty, swept clean as a church. The only sprite left aboard sat on the rail with its star still on, watching the harbour lights come up. Tobias never mentioned the shovel again. He just filled my tea mug every watch after that, and said nothing, which for Tobias was a speech.