Traditional style colour tattoo of a lit candle with a drip-covered purple and blue wax body and a brass holder, with the words A FIRE INSIDE beneath, on the upper arm.

Candle with A FIRE INSIDE lettering

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A lit candle with a yellow flame sits in a gold and green brass holder, its blue and purple wax running with drips down the sides. The phrase A FIRE INSIDE is set in black capitals beneath the holder, with a few small green and purple accents curling around its base. Bold black outlines and flat, graduated colour fills give the piece a classic traditional look, photographed close-up on the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Candle Flame Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Penhallow gave her son a tallow candle in a brass holder the morning the Margaret Ann cleared the harbour, and told him to keep it lit through the dark hours whatever the weather did. He laughed at her. By the Horn he had stopped laughing, because the wind had taken the mainsail and the sea had taken two of the watch, and the only light left below decks was the one he tended every night.

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The wax ran in the cold. It came down the sides in slow blue tears and pooled round the brass, and each morning he scraped it away and set the candle straight again. The mate wanted it snuffed to save the lamp oil. The cook called it witchery. Hob, the youngest, sat with his back against the bulkhead and watched the small yellow flame lean and right itself, lean and right itself, and he said that was how a man ought to bear a storm.

On the forty-second night a wave came through the skylight and filled the galley. The captain came below soaked to the bone and found the boy asleep with his hand cupped round the holder to shield it from the draught. The flame stood tall above his fingers, steady as a bell rope. Nobody spoke of it after. They raised Valparaiso in April, and when Hob came home he set the stub on his mother's kitchen table and lit it. Ruth looked at him across the wick and saw that the warmth had never really been in the candle at all.