Two side-by-side photos of traditional-style colour tattoos on skin: a flaming marshmallow on a stick on the left, and a campfire with logs on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flaming marshmallow and campfire tattoos

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The left photo shows two marshmallows on a stick, each with flames rising from it, drawn with bold black outlines and orange, yellow and blue shading. The right photo shows a campfire with flames above a glowing white and orange ember, resting on crossed logs. Both tattoos use solid colour fills and a bold outline, with the flames as the main focal point in each panel.

Traditional Forearm Flame Campfire Log Fire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the stick in the bottom of the kitchen drawer, still tacky from last summer, and by the time you've wiped it down the power has been off for an hour. Out past the balcony the estate's windows go dark in ragged blocks until only the orange sodium lamps on Hallam Road are left, humming to themselves as if nobody had told them to stop.

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Up on the flat roof of Number 14 everyone has brought something. Priya has a bottle of cheap prosecco and a theory about her gran's allotment. Tomas has a tin of pilchards nobody will touch. You have two marshmallows, a lighter with maybe three sparks left in it, and a bucket of charcoal from the Co-op that Dev swears was dry. You build the fire in the bucket, feed it cardboard and a broken chair leg, and it catches with a whump that sends the pigeons off the aerial.

Priya skewers the first marshmallow and holds it out at arm's length, the way her gran taught her. It goes up like a match, a yellow flame standing on top of it, and she shrieks and laughs and blows it out. The second one you hold lower, patient, turning it until it swells and blisters gold. It drips onto the charcoal and spits blue, and for one second the whole roof is lit from underneath, the faces you have known for years suddenly unfamiliar and bright.

When the streetlights stutter back on, one row at a time, everyone cheers and nobody moves to put the fire out. You pull the stick free. The marshmallow is black on one side and white on the other, a small hot coal of a thing, and you eat it straight off the wood anyway, burning your mouth, grinning like someone who has just been let back in.