Black tribal flame design
Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash
A bold tribal design made of solid black shapes on a plain white background, with sweeping curves, pointed flame-like tips and a spiral at its centre. The linework is thick and filled, with no shading or grey tones. The design is shown on its own, cropped tightly with a little white space around it, and no body part is visible.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Ada Pryce kept her pole oiled and her wick trimmed, because the gaslamp company docked a penny for every lamp left dark on Gorse Row. Her father had worked the same three streets for twenty years before his chest gave out, and he had taught her to read a flame the way other people read weather. A good flame stood up straight and blue at its root. A bad one sulked, leaned, and threw sparks like a drunk man's temper.
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On the night of the fog, she climbed the ladder at the Mill Lane lamp and found the mantle split. The glass had cracked in the cold, and the jet was hissing in a spiral, twisting round the broken collar as though it wanted out. She stood on the rung for longer than the job needed. Below her, a dog barked twice and stopped. The flame bent, caught the draught from the chimney stack, and rose in a tall, sooty tongue that no match could have coaxed in such weather.
She did not light it. She pulled the cord, shut the cock, and came down with the pole across her shoulders like a rifle. Her father would have scolded her for that. Instead she walked home the long way, past the dark lamps, counting them the way he had taught her, until she reached her own door and saw one window at the top of the Row still burning, its flame standing up straight and clean as a candle in a church.
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