Colourful tattoo on the outer thigh showing a pastel cloud with a masked face, soot sprites, stars, rainbow drips and a small mouse-like creature.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Soot sprites and masked cloud on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a pastel cloud with a masked face at the top, surrounded by black soot sprites with white eyes and small multicoloured stars. Rainbow drips fall from the cloud, and a small pale creature with large ears hangs from a soot sprite at the lower right. The linework is clean and dark, with soft, glowing shading and bright pink, purple, teal and yellow ink across the design.

Thigh Soot sprite Cloud Star Rainbow Drip Mouse Creature

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashdown was sent up the chimney of the dye works at Kettle Lane because old Sam Ferris's knees had given out. The flues were full of soot sprites, round as conkers, with pale button eyes that rolled off her brushes and sat along the rafters watching her work. "They don't care for the new coal," Sam had said from his chair by the door. "Be civil to them and they'll be civil back."

Keep reading

Every spring the cloud came down the valley. It was the colour of sugared almonds, and it stopped above the vats with its quiet face turned towards the works, red stripes on its cheeks and its eyes closed. When it wept, the rain came out pink and teal and a yellow that stained the sheep for a week. Nobody in Kettle Lane could say who the cloud belonged to. The sprites called it the Lodger, and they would follow it anywhere.

That wet Tuesday the sprites would not come down. Nell found them massed in the throat of the flue, and tangled among them was a small pale creature with enormous ears, clinging to a sprite's back as if it had ridden down the chimney by mistake and could not find its way back up. She tucked it into her apron pocket and climbed out onto the roof. The sprites streamed after her like smoke, and when she held the creature up, the cloud bent low over the chimney pots and let its colours fall.

The river ran clear for the first time in forty years. Mr Ferris paid her for the morning and not a penny more. That evening, when she emptied her apron on the windowsill, a single star no bigger than a sequin lay among the soot, faintly glowing, and it did not wash off.