Black ink tattoo of a stylised flame inside a hand-drawn circle, placed on the inner wrist.

Flame inside a circle on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised flame with tapering tongues of fire, drawn in solid black ink inside a bold, slightly uneven circular outline. The linework is thick and fairly uniform, with the flame filled in solid rather than shaded, and the design is centred on the inner wrist against pale skin. The photograph is taken at a slight angle with a plain, softly lit background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bus has already gone, so you walk the long way down past the shuttered launderette and the chip shop with its hatch pulled down. Your phone is at four per cent and the streetlamps hum the way they always do before one of them gives up. Somewhere behind you a shutter rattles. You keep your left hand in your coat pocket, the way Nan taught you to keep a hand warm, and you think about the match your brother struck on the back step the summer you were nine, how he cupped it so carefully it seemed a crime to blow it out.

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The man at the corner of Holt Street is selling nothing tonight. He is just leaning on the railings with a paper cup going cold in his fingers. When you pass he looks at your wrist, not your face, and nods as if you have shown him a password. You realise you have pushed your sleeve back without meaning to. The ring of ink is still dark there, the flame inside it solid and unhurried, its tongues leaning all one way like grass in a wind you cannot feel.

You stop at the bridge over the canal and hold the wrist out over the rail. The water below is black and takes the streetlight apart into pieces. You had thought you would feel braver doing this, or foolish, but mostly you feel the cold of the iron against your skin. Then you tuck the hand back into your pocket, where it is warm, and walk on toward the lights of home, the flame still burning quietly in its circle where no one can see it but you.

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