Colour tattoo of swirling flame-like shapes with small white star sparkles across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful swirling flame tattoo on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A bare upper back shows a large abstract tattoo of swirling, flame-like curls that spread diagonally from the shoulder blade towards the top of the shoulder. The linework is soft and blended, with shading that gives the shapes depth. Pink, red, orange, yellow, green and purple ink dominate, and small white four-point stars are scattered through the swirls.

Back Swirl Flame Star Sparkle Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ceiling of the Starline Ballroom had been bare plaster for eleven years when Mr Hebden hired me to fill it. I told him I would need a ladder, a tin of every colour the chandler on Pier Road could spare, and a fortnight of nights when nobody was dancing. He laughed. I did not. I had watched the lamps throw their heat up into that dome every Saturday, and the cigarette smoke always drifted towards the cornice and hung there, as if it wanted to get out.

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So I painted flames. They started at the cornice in pinks and reds, then ran into oranges and yellows where the lamps would catch them. Where the old damp had come through I used green, and in the shadows I laid purple so the curls would look deep enough to walk into. Fitting them to the curve of the dome, I found they wanted to turn back on themselves, the way a fire does when it is chasing something. Each night, once the band had packed up, I added stars, four points each, no bigger than a thumbnail, in white lead that caught the light when the bulbs came on.

On the last night Mr Hebden came up the ladder with a flask of tea and stood with his hand on the rung, looking up. He asked why I had put stars in when nobody had ordered stars. I said flames need something to rise towards. He didn't answer that. Then the band struck up a slow waltz, the floor filled, and a girl in a green dress stopped in the middle of it, pointed upwards and said, quite clearly, "They're moving."

The hall did a brisk trade that winter, and everyone said it was the ceiling. I kept my ladder in the back room and never charged for the work. Some nights, after the lights had gone down, I still climbed up and pressed one star with my thumb, just to see whether it would come away on my skin. It never did.