Colour tattoo of a girl hugging a white dragon with two soot sprites and the words I knew you were good, set inside a heart on a forearm.

Spirited Away scene in a heart on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an anime-style girl with auburn hair embracing a pale grey-white dragon, with two black soot sprites with white eyes and small yellow and pink stars at the lower edge. The scene sits inside a heart framed by teal with white dots, and the script words I knew you were good run across the top. Bold black outlines, flat colour fills and soft blended shading on the dragon and background give it a neo-traditional finish.

Neo-trad Forearm Dragon Soot sprite Heart Star Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river had stopped running the afternoon my father sent me up through the birches with the rent money in a tobacco tin. Nobody in Hollin Cross had seen the grey water go still before, and the old men said it meant something had been taken. I found the thing lying across the stepping stones, long as a barge and pale as ash, its scales dulled to the colour of wet slate. It was breathing in short, reluctant pulls.

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Soot balls scrambled out of the bracken to meet me, black and round as conkers, each with two white eyes and a star pinned to its belly like a lost penny. They were cross with me. "You've come to take the last of it," one said, and I said I had only come for the rent, which made them laugh so hard two of them rolled into the ferns. The creature lifted its head. Its name had been stolen, the soot balls said, by a man who sold names at the lowland fair, and without it the water had forgotten where to flow.

I did not know the name. I knew my grandmother's, and the name of the miller's dog, and I knew that a thing with no name will hold on to whoever is closest. So I sat down in the wet moss and let it lay its cold head in my lap, and I told it everything I could think of: the tin, the birches, the bakery smell of the village at dusk, the way my mother says my name when I am late. Somewhere in the telling the water began to move.

When the sprites left, each dropped a star in my apron pocket. Back home my father counted the coins and asked where the rent had gone. I said the river had kept it, which was true, and that the river had said I was good, which was nearly true. The stars are still in the tin. They are warm when I hold them, and sometimes, when the wind comes down off the ridge, they hum.