Colour traditional tattoo of three grey shaded dice surrounded by orange and yellow flames on the inside of a forearm.

Dice in flames on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three dice with black pips are shown in shaded grey tones, with the top die partly overlapping the others. Bold black outlines and flat orange, red and yellow flames wrap around the dice on the forearm. The colour is concentrated in the flames, while the dice are rendered in black and grey with soft highlights.

Traditional Forearm Dice Flame Fire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobiah Crane kept the ovens at the bottom of Mill Lane, and every night before the carts came he lit them himself, because his father had said a fire lit by someone else never bakes true. One night in February a stranger knocked on the back door with frost on his collar and asked for a warm place to sit. Tobiah let him in, because the bread was already rising and it is bad luck to turn a man from a warm door.

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The stranger had three dice in his coat pocket, bone white, with black pips worn soft from handling. He set them on the floured board between the proving baskets and said he would wager the oven's heat against the bread, one loaf for each pip he threw. Tobiah laughed, then did not laugh, because the dice came up sixes before they had stopped spinning, and the oven door swung open on its own and the flames leapt up the brick as if they had been waiting for their cue.

Tobiah shut the door with his bare hand and felt no burn. The stranger rolled again and the flames climbed the wall in orange tongues, licking at the flour sacks and curling over the dice where they sat, and still they did not catch. "You have fire enough," the stranger said, "but not the nerve to let it go." So Tobiah threw. He threw a double one, the worst throw there is, and the flames bowed down like wheat in wind and went quiet.

At first light the carts came and found every loaf in the shop burnt black except one, which was golden and still warm. On the board beside it lay three dice with their pips turned up, all ones, and the stranger was gone.