Black and grey tattoo of Totoro holding an umbrella on the lower leg, with soot sprites running across the top of the foot.

Totoro and soot sprites on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A grey Totoro character holds a dark umbrella above its head on the lower leg, with a small green leaf beside it and a pale belly shaded in soft tones. Several black, fuzzy soot sprites with simple eyes trail from the ankle across the top of the foot, some grouped together and some scattered. The shading is smooth and the composition follows the curve of the leg, with the figures set on bare skin against a dark seat.

Ankle Totoro Umbrella Soot sprite Leaf Character Foot Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus to Hollin Gap stopped running after the landslip, so you walk the drovers' track over Grey Nab with a black umbrella that belonged to a woman you never met. The rain comes sideways off the scree and the ruts fill faster than you can step out of them. Halfway up, where the path bends under a lone ash, you find a drift of soot-black fluff in the ditch, and a dozen small faces turn towards you at once.

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They are soot sprites, the sort that live in the cold corners of old mill houses and roll out at dusk to clean the grates. This one has lost its way. It climbs onto your sleeve and hums like a kettle that has not quite boiled. Then the bracken parts and a grey shape rises from it, the size of a haystack, belly round as a barrel, holding a broad green leaf over its head against the weather. It looks at your umbrella, then at you, and makes a noise like a disapproving aunt.

You hold the umbrella over both of you, and it takes the handle in its soft paws as though it has done this a thousand times. It lifts the sprites from the ditch one by one and tucks them into its fur, and they settle there like coals in ash. All the way up the pass it walks beside you, its belly brushing the heather, and the rain runs off its leaf without touching you.

At the cairn the cloud breaks open and the valley below is suddenly full of lamplight. The grey creature sets one sprite down on the stone. It blinks, tips over the edge, and is gone. When you reach the inn at the bottom, there is a warm, humming weight in your coat pocket that refuses to go back to the ditch.