Colour tattoo on a thigh of a yellow duck sitting in a wooden bath tub, surrounded by small black soot sprites and star-shaped flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yellow duck in a wooden tub on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A yellow duck with a folded cloth on its head sits in a wooden tub, with teal water spilling over the rim. Round black soot sprites with white eyes and small coloured flower shapes drift around it, and a pale plush figure in a green-edged frame sits to the left. Bold black outlines and bright yellow, teal and green fills sit on bare skin against a dark patterned background.

Neo-trad Thigh Soot sprite Flower Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have carried water up the pass every morning since the thaw, two buckets on a yoke, and by the time you reach the bathhouse at the top of the switchbacks your shoulders have stopped complaining. The duck is already waiting on the step. Her name is Mrs Pim, though nobody remembers who named her, and she sits in the old cedar tub as if she paid for it. Someone has folded a flannel over her head against the draught, and she regards you with one round eye and then the other.

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The soot sprites arrive with the fog, as they always do when the boiler is lit. You hear them before you see them, a dry pattering in the rafters, and then they drop down on thin black legs and cluster in the steam like wet dandelion seed. The old keeper says they are mountain dust taking the warm air for itself. You have never seen one hold still long enough to prove him wrong. Mrs Pim watches them with mild disapproval until one bolder than the rest climbs onto the rim and presents her with a pale pink blossom, which she accepts with a dignified nod.

The letter comes up with the mule train in late autumn. The lower road has flooded, the inn will shut until spring, and the keys must be carried down before the snow closes the pass. You stand in the doorway with the iron ring in your hand and look at the tub. Mrs Pim has pushed the flannel off with her beak and is blowing bubbles at the ceiling, and the water slops over the teal-edged rim in a bright, unhurried spill.

You fill the tub one last time. The sprites gather in the rafters and do not drop down, which the keeper says is how you know they are sad to see the season end. When you leave, you prop the bathhouse door open a hand's width so the warm air can follow you down the mountain, and behind you a small yellow voice, very pleased with itself, begins to sing.