Black and grey tattoo of flame-like scrollwork and swirls on a forearm, with a wristwatch worn over a small tattoo near the wrist.

Flame-like scrollwork on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm bears a large black and grey tattoo of stylised flame or feather-like scrollwork that runs from the elbow towards the wrist. The linework is fine to medium weight with soft grey shading inside the curling shapes. A small tattoo near the wrist is partly hidden by a leather-strapped wristwatch and a gold bracelet, and the background is a blurred green garden.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over the hill to Carrow Common the week the frost broke, three painted wagons and a steam organ that wheezed out the same six notes all day. At the back of the largest wagon sat a thin man called Tobin Pell, who sold fire. Not the fire itself, he said, but the knack of it: a clay lamp, a pinch of grey powder, a breath held just so, and the air above his palm would curl up in the shapes of feathers.

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Nell Harrow, the blacksmith's girl, came every evening to watch and asked how the feathers stayed in the air. They don't stay, Tobin told her. They only forget to fall. He showed her how to make the curls with a goose quill dipped in ink, drawing a line that turned back on itself until it became a flame, and then another line that curled inside the first, and another, until the whole arm of her sleeve looked like a fire rising. Her father said she had wasted a good quill and a good week.

The fair packed up after the harvest moon. Tobin climbed onto the last cart without his lamp, and Nell never saw him again. She kept the lamp on her windowsill through forty winters. When the organ came back to Carrow one spring and nobody remembered his face, she took the lamp down, warmed it in her hands, and breathed across the powder the way he had taught her. The smoke rose in feathers, curling and turning as if it had somewhere to be. She watched it climb to the rafters and understood, at last, that the trick had never been in the lamp at all. She set it back on the sill and went to fetch her ink.

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