Colour tattoo of a vertical column of cartoon creatures, including a black cat, a fire sprite and small black soot sprites, on the forearm.

Stacked cartoon creatures on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A column of cartoon creatures runs down the forearm, including a blue shape with a pale sack, a black cat with large round eyes, a white mask-faced figure, a yellow and red flame-like sprite, small black fuzzy sprites and an orange striped creature at the bottom. The bold outlines are filled with flat, solid colour and simple shading. The colours are mixed across the column, with blues, blacks and whites above and warm oranges and yellows below.

Forearm Cat Soot sprite Creature Column

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every winter the stove in the old lodge at Hollin Fold went out at midnight, and every winter Mrs Ferrier's grandson crept down to relight it before anyone could wake. He was nine and thought the sprite in the firebox was his secret. It was not. The soot sprites had been watching him from the flue for weeks, counting the matches he dropped, and they had opinions about his technique.

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On the night of the thaw the house ran short of coal. The boy stood in the cold kitchen with an empty scuttle and no idea what to do, until the black cat from the dresser jumped down and walked straight to the back door, tail high, looking over its shoulder. Behind the lodge the hill was dark and the path to the bothy was under two feet of snow. The blue creature with the pale sack was already waiting by the gate, its bundle swinging, as if it had known all along where the coal was kept.

They climbed together, the boy, the cat, and the grey-faced stranger who never spoke but kept pace behind them like a moon. The striped beast ran ahead in long bounds and came back with the scent of a dry stack under a fallen fir. When they returned, carrying what they could, the fire sprite was already awake in the grate, flickering with what looked very much like satisfaction. The soot sprites had blackened the chimney cap so the smoke rose straight.

Mrs Ferrier never asked where the coal had come from. She only noticed that the kitchen was warm before dawn, and that three small black sprites had left a neat row of footprints across the hearthstone, each one the length of a fingernail.