Fine line black tattoo on the inner wrist showing two small white-faced forest spirits with a sprout between them, styled in simple outline.

Two forest spirits and a sprout on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small, round-headed forest spirits with solid dark patches on their faces sit either side of a tiny sprout with two leaves and a root. The linework is thin and even, with the markings filled in solid black and no shading. The black ink design is centred on the inner wrist against pale skin and a plain background.

Fine line Forearm Leaves Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spirits came ashore at Scarrow Head the winter the lamp went dark, riding a split oak trunk that the sea had torn from some far-off cliff. Ada Penhallow found them at first light, two round-headed things no taller than a kettle, sitting either side of the wet timber with their dark-patched faces turned towards the lighthouse as if it owed them an explanation.

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They did not speak. They tapped their knuckles on the stones and pointed inland, where nothing grew but gorse and sheep sorrel, and Ada, who had buried a husband and two brothers to the sea, understood them better than she expected. She carried a bucket of earth up the spiral stair and set it on the gallery, and into it one of them pressed a seed taken from its own sleeve.

By the next spring a sprout stood in that bucket with two leaves and a root that curled over the rim. The spirits sat either side of it every evening while Ada trimmed the wick, and the light, which had flickered all winter, burned steady through every fog that rolled off the Atlantic. The boats came home. Ada wrote it in the log in plain pencil and didn't say why.

When Ada grew too frail for the stair, the spirits lifted the bucket between them and carried it down to the cliff. They set it in a crack where wind-bent blackthorn had begun to take hold, and the seedling took root there too. Her successor found only one leaf pressed flat between the pages of the log, and a single line in her hand: keep the light, and let the tree have the rain.