Black blackwork tattoo of a stylised flame inside a bold hand-drawn circle, placed on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flame inside a circle on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised flame with tapering, flickering tongues rendered in solid black ink, enclosed by a thick, slightly irregular black circle. The linework is bold with little shading, and the flame sits off-centre within the ring, which leaves a band of bare skin between them. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the tattoo, with the skin tone and texture visible around it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the lamp's only got so much oil and the marsh wind is stealing what warmth we've got. Mind the rope. Now, will you hear about Ada Pennick and the fire ring, or go and gawp at the pig with two heads again?

Keep reading

Ada was fire-eater on Haskett's Travelling Wonders, and she could hold a torch in her mouth till the wick went cold. Nobody knew the flame was never hers to make. Each night before the show she drew a ring in the dust with her boot heel, one stroke, no lifting, then stepped inside and waited for the fire to come up through the ground like a cat through a hedge.

That autumn the fair pitched on Thornwick Common, where the old gasworks had burned and nobody had bothered to fence the pit. On the third night the flame did not come. Instead the ring filled with dark, and the dark had a shape, black tongues leaning towards the wagons, and the children started crying for their mothers.

Ada walked into the middle of it with the lamp in one hand. She did not sing. She breathed out slow, the way her mother taught her, and the tongues bent back one by one until a single flame stood in the ring, off to one side, never once touching the edge. That was how the good ones always sat, with room to breathe. Haskett swore it was a trick, but he never charged a penny for the Common again.

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