Neo-traditional style colour tattoo on a forearm showing a black heart pierced by green leaves, with a red form with black crosses and dark smoke-like wisps above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black heart with green leaves on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black heart with bold green leaves or thorns crossing its lower right side, with a red rounded form decorated with black crosses sitting above it. Dark smoke-like wisps curl around the top of the design, and fine dotted lines trail beneath the heart. The black areas are smoothly shaded, while the red and green are bright and dominate the colour palette, set against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top has gone soft at the seams, and you can smell the paraffin before you see the wagons. Mr Ansel Dray keeps the last fire pot lit for you because you are the only one left who knows the old sequence: breath, spit, the long pull of smoke, then the snuff. Tonight the canvas sags over a crowd of nine people and a dog who has learned to sleep through applause.

Keep reading

Behind the caravans your props sit in a crate marked FRAGILE in a hand nobody can read anymore. There is the lead heart the knife-thrower used to hang from his belt for luck, black as a stove and twice as heavy. There is the bundle of brass-tipped rose canes from the Russian act, which still pricks your thumb when you reach for the snuffer. And the snuffer itself, a red cap with black iron crosses punched through it, which your grandmother swore kept the flame from walking off on its own.

The owner wants a wage cut, a new tent, a sponsor with a van. You want none of those things. You want to walk out into the sawdust with the heart strapped to your chest, the canes thorned round it like a hedge, and breathe the fire up until the smoke curls over the rafters and nobody in the seats can tell whether it is the act or the end of it.

The last show runs long. When you finally pinch the flame out, the lead heart is warm through your shirt and the crowd is on its feet, and for a moment the whole decline turns into a sound like rain on canvas. Then the lights go down, and you set the snuffer back in its crate, careful with the crosses, the way you would put a sleeping child to bed.

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