Traditional style tattoo of a glass jar with three fireflies and red flowers with teal leaves on a forearm.

Firefly jar with red flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A grey glass jar with a ridged lid holds three fireflies, each with a glowing yellow-orange abdomen, and red flowers with teal leaves frame the base and sides. Bold black outlines define the forms, with solid grey shading on the jar and flat colour fills on the insects and flowers. The jar sits centrally along the forearm, with the flowers balancing the composition at the top and bottom.

Traditional Forearm Jar Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jar had sat on the sill since August, and by the second week of January the lid had rusted at its ridges. Nell Harrow took it down anyway, held it to the kitchen lamp, and watched the three insects inside wake one after another, their bellies lighting a soft yellow that the grey glass turned the colour of weak milk.

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The snow had shut the lane since Boxing Day. Her father had gone out to the top field before the blizzard came in, to see to the ewes, and he had not come back. Her brother Tom stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands and said the lamps were no use in this, that the wind would take the flame before it reached the gate. Nell said the lamps were made of tin and oil. The jar was made of summer.

She pulled the lid free, which took both hands, and let the cold in. The fireflies climbed onto the rim, stood a moment as if deciding, then lifted into the white air. They went up the hill ahead of the two of them, low and steady, blinking the way a person counts steps. Tom followed the lights through drifts to his waist, and Nell kept a hand fixed in the back of his coat. At the top field the lights hung over a hump of snow, and beneath it her father's hand reached out of the drift, red at the fingers, still gripping his crook.

They carried him down between them. Afterwards the jar went back on the sill, empty and open, and every morning the frost came up on the glass in the shape of wings. Nell left it there until the first thaw, because she had decided that summer could wait for spring to come and fetch it.