Large black and grey realism tattoo across a full back showing a top-hatted goblin holding a lantern, with bats, mushrooms and skulls.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Top-hatted goblin with money bag on a full back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers most of a person's back, centred on a top-hatted goblin figure holding a lantern in one hand and a small glowing item in the other, with a sack marked with a dollar sign at his waist. Around him are bats, toadstool mushrooms, skulls and a gnarled tree within swirling clouds. The shading is smooth and detailed, with strong contrast between dark areas and light highlights across the figure and the background.

Realism Back Top hat Lantern Dollar sign Bat Mushroom Skull Tree Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goblin came up out of the mire below Vellum Ford the night the millers stopped paying their tithe to the ferryman. Nobody saw him rise. They only found the reeds bent flat in a ring around the old alder, and a sack of coins tied to its lowest branch, heavy enough to split the bark.

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His hat was black and too tall for any head in the parish. He carried a lantern with a horn window, and in the other hand a candle stub that never guttered, though the wind came off the fen hard enough to lift the thatch. When the widow Aske asked him what he wanted, he only lifted the lantern and showed her the inside of it, where a small grey moth was beating itself against the glass, patient as a clock.

He wanted the debt, he said. Not her debt, nor the millers', but the one everyone in Vellum had been owing since their grandmothers' time, the small kindnesses left unpaid and the lies that went unanswered. He would take them into his sack and carry them down into the mushroom rings where the bats kept their roost, and he would leave the coins behind in their place.

It cost the parish a good deal to learn what the coins were worth. The widow Aske paid her debt in full that winter, and found in the morning that her sack had grown no lighter. The goblin, they say, still walks the fen with his lamp lit, and when he passes the alder he stops to tap the bark with his candle, as if counting.