Traditional style colour tattoo of a campfire with orange flames, logs and grey stones on the lower leg.

Campfire with flames and rocks on a leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A campfire tattoo shows tall orange and red flames with black outlines and dotted black shading, rising above stacked brown logs and a ring of grey stones. Four small sparkle shapes sit around the flames. The bold black outlines and flat colour fills, with stippled shading on the stones and flame tips, are typical of traditional tattooing. The design is centred on a pale skin background with a soft white cloth beneath.

Traditional Calf Campfire Flame Log Rock Stone Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Ammon, the fire is still burning, though Sefu swore at dusk that it would be dead by the third watch. I have sat beside it for two hours with my back to the wind and my tablet on my knee, and I am writing by its light because the moon has gone behind the ridge and the lamp oil is finished.

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You will laugh at me for the stones. We came down the wadi with four camels and a boy who cannot count past nine, and when we reached the dry spring, Sefu got down and began fitting river rocks into a ring as though he were laying the foundation of a house. I asked him why. He said the men who came before us had done the same, that their fire had left a black crust on the stones, and that the next caravan had found it and lit it in a breath. Nobody here knows those men's names. Their stones keep the cold off the ground all the same.

So we have fed it the cedar we brought and the thorn branches the boy gathered, and the flames have climbed twice the height of a man. The sparks go up in threes and fours. I counted them against the stars until my eyes ached, and then Sefu told me every spark was a traveller who had gone on ahead and would not be back. I told him he was a poor reader of omens. He only laughed and banked the logs.

When we leave at dawn I will bank it too, and I will lay the last of the thorn wood on the stones so it smoulders. Someone will come up this wadi in a month with empty skins and a cough, and they will find a fire still warm. Write to me of the sea. Tell me whether the boats are mended. I am sending this with the carrier going west, and I hope his camel is faster than my handwriting.

Your brother, Tesh