Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two round soot-like sprites with large eyes and a faceted black crystal across the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two soot sprites and a crystal on a shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two round, dark soot-like sprites with large white eyes and thin black legs, with a faceted black crystal above and small scattered dots around them. The shadows around the sprites are built from fine stippled dots that fade outward, while the eyes and crystal use solid black and clean outlines. The composition is in black ink and grey tones only, spreading across the shoulder and upper arm.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Soot sprite Creature Eye Crystal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steam engine at the back of Pennock's Golden Gallopers had been coughing since Carlisle, and Dora swore it was the sprites again. I told her sprites were something you said to frighten the apprentices. She only handed me the lamp and told me to climb into the firebox before the pressure gauge crept round the top of its dial.

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Inside, the boiler was as black as a chimney's throat, and soot had gathered in the corners like wet ash. Two of them sat on the grate, round as puddings, with eyes big enough to see my own face in. Their legs were thin as wire dipped in ink, and when the lamp swung they blinked slowly, one eye and then the other, as if I were the strange thing in there. Between them lay a black stone shaped like a broken cartwheel hub, faceted and cold, the sort the old showmen called a coal diamond, though nobody had ever dug one from a pit.

I knelt and tried to shift the stone, but it would not budge. The sprites shuffled closer, and where they moved the dark came off them in fine grains that settled on my sleeves and the rivets like the stipple of a drawing. Dora had told me the trick: you do not take the crystal, you give them back the soot they have lost. So I scraped the cinders from the ash pan and tipped them onto the grate in a neat heap, the way my grandfather taught me to lay a fire.

When I climbed out, the engine turned over on the first stroke and the gallopers began to spin, the painted horses rising and falling in the dusk. Dora met me at the steps with her hand held out, palm up, and in it lay the small black stone, warm as a loaf. 'They like a fair,' she said. 'Someone has to keep them fed.'