Colour full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm, showing orange flames, grey stonework, a cross and blue flowers in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full sleeve with flames, cross and flowers

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A person in a black vest top leans against a white wall, with their arm covered by a full sleeve tattoo. The design includes orange and red flames, grey stone-like shapes, a banner with partly visible lettering, a cross and blue flowers. The colour ink dominates, with shading used on the grey elements and the composition running from shoulder towards the elbow.

Traditional Upper arm Flame Banner Cross Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell at St Oswin's cracked on the morning of the fire, and by noon Tom Garrow had been sent up the tower with a bucket of lime and orders not to look down. He looked down anyway. Smoke was rising from the cooper's yard beyond the lych gate, orange at its root, and the cottages behind it seemed to lean towards the church as if it might hold them.

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Old Pritchard, who had cut every headstone in the parish for forty years, did not come out to watch. He stayed in his shed with grey Portland blocks stacked around him like loaves, chiselling a name nobody had asked him to carve. When Tom came down with lime on his sleeves, the old man said, 'Stone doesn't burn, boy. It only remembers the heat.' Tom took it for the kind of thing said by a man who had been drinking since breakfast.

The fire took the cooper's, then the chapel roof, then stopped at the churchyard wall as though someone had told it to. Afterwards the villagers carried water in buckets and wore the soot like medals. Pritchard's blocks came out of his shed scorched blue at the edges, and he set them along the lych gate without a word, flames licking up one side and a banner of unfinished letters across the top.

Years later, when Tom was an old man himself, a boy asked him why the gate was the only thing in the parish with fire carved into it. Tom ran his thumb over the lichen filling the lettering and said the mason had been waiting for the fire to tell him what to write. Then he sent the boy home before dark.