Black blackwork tattoo of a pentagram inside a circle with flame-like rays, on the ankle of a leg wearing a silver sequinned high-heeled shoe.

Flame-ringed pentagram on an ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tattoo shows a five-pointed star outlined inside a ring, surrounded by sharp flame-like rays. The linework is bold and the black ink is fully saturated, with no shading or colour. The design is centred on the ankle and photographed at close range against a dark wooden floor, with a sequinned platform heel in the frame.

Blackwork Ankle Pentagram Sun Flame Circle Star High heel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found the lime again, so Aunt Pell sent me up the north stair with a pot of tar, a stiff brush and orders not to look down the well shaft on the way. The castle had been roofless since my grandfather's time, a shell of grey stone with ivy pushing through every window, but the gatehouse lintel still stood, and on it sat the sign we kept black: a five-pointed star inside a ring, with a crown of flames around the ring that some mason had cut so sharply you could feel the points through a glove.

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Down in the valley they said the sign kept the well from breathing up the cold. I had never believed that, and I said so, but Aunt Pell only handed me the brush and told me to start at the left-hand flame, where the stone was softest. The tar went on thick and smelled of pine pitch and wet smoke. Halfway round the ring I scraped a patch clear and found a second circle underneath, shallower and wobblier, the kind a child makes with a thumb and a sharpened nail. It had been there longer than anyone alive could remember, painted over every spring for two hundred years and never once quite covered.

I stopped, and Aunt Pell came up the stair breathing hard and looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then she said the mason had carved the flames, but the child had carved the ring, and that was the part that mattered. I finished the flames black and left the little circle showing, the way a child would want it. When I came down the rain had stopped, the well was quiet, and the tar smelled like the first warm evening of the year.