Traditional style colour tattoo of a lit candle in a brass candlestick with a pink rose and green leaves, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Candlestick and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A lit candle with a grey, drip-covered body sits in a yellow-gold candlestick holder, with a pale yellow and orange glow behind the flame. A pink rose with green leaves sits at the base of the candlestick. The lines are bold and dark, the colours are flat and saturated, and the design is centred on a plain pale background.

Traditional Forearm Candle Flame Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The night shift at Cold Wennock is quiet enough that I can hear the candle in the office guttering when the wind comes under the door. You will laugh, but I have started keeping one lit on the sill, a squat brass candlestick Mrs Abbot left behind when she retired, its handle curled like a question mark. The rest of the building runs on electric now, but the lorries still come through in the small hours and the forms still need a light to read by when the bulb fails, which it does every second week.

Last Tuesday a man came to the window with a rose wrapped in newspaper. He had nothing else. He said it was for his mother in the village on the far side, and that she had planted it the year the bridge went up. I told him roses do not cross on paperwork, and he said that was exactly what the officer before me had said, and that he had eventually been let through with it. I looked at the stamp and the rose and the candle burning between us, and I stamped his form with a hand I did not quite trust.

I think about that more than I should. The flame in the glass lights the wall behind the counter, a warm disc like a sun that does not set, and every time the door opens the draught bends it sideways. Mrs Abbot used to say a flame that bends toward you is a flame that wants to go somewhere.

Come home at Easter if they give you the days. I will keep the candle lit until then, and you can tell me whether the rose survived the journey.

Yours, Ilse