Black ink line drawing of an ornate genie lamp with swirling smoke, hanging gem drops and sparkles, drawn on cream paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Genie lamp with smoke and hanging gems

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink line drawing of an ornate oil lamp with a curved spout, a domed lid and a beaded chain, with two faceted gem drops hanging below. Swirling smoke rises and curls around the lamp, with small bubble-like circles and four sparkle shapes in the upper area. The linework is bold and even in black on cream paper, with no shading or colour, and the composition fills the sheet.

Smoke Gem Sparkle Bead

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spout has a crack you filled with candle wax last night, and by the second house the wax has gone soft under the spotlights. Mr Ansell hands you the lamp across the caravan step and says, "Don't let them see the join," the same way he has said it every evening since the big top lost its red stripe. You take it out to the sawdust ring that is now mostly a car park's worth of mud, and you set it on the little brass stand where the smoke pot waits in the dark.

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The smoke is dry ice from the cookhouse freezer, and the gems are cut glass from a chandelier that fell in a flat in Stoke. Nobody in the front rows knows that. They lean in when Ansell raises his hands, and you turn the lid, and the grey cloud rolls up over the beaded chain and spreads along the canvas like something that has been waiting a long time to be asked. Behind the stand a child with a sticky ice lolly says, loudly, that it's a fake, and her mother says hush, and you feel the old thrill of a trick that still works anyway.

After the last house the lorries are loaded, the lights of the fairground dimmed one bank at a time, and the ground is cold enough to see your breath. You carry the lamp to the cab yourself. Ansell is already asleep in the passenger seat with his cap over his eyes. You set the lamp on the dashboard, lift the lid one last time, and watch a single thread of smoke curl out of the cracked spout, turn once in the headlights, and drift away over the empty field where the tent used to stand.