Black and grey flash drawing of a tattooed forearm and hand gripping a torch, with an eagle and the words Death Before Dishonor on the arm.

Hand holding a torch over a striped flag

Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white illustration of a hand and forearm holding a torch with a flame, set against a sunburst and a striped flag with a star field. The arm is covered in tattoo designs including an eagle, a dollar sign, star shapes on the fingers and the phrase Death Before Dishonor. The linework is bold and uniform, with fine hatching in the flame, crown and sunburst, and the image uses no colour.

Forearm Hand Hand Forearm Flag Eagle Dollar sign Star Sunburst Flame Crown Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Odile Pryce had been counting the same tray of pocket watches since the church clock struck two, and when the bell-rope man came in with a brass torch wrapped in a feed sack, she didn't look up until he set it on her counter with a clang that shivered the watches.

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"Bought it off a fellow at the fish market," he said. "Says it's off a bigger statue down the estuary. Says the flame used to light up the whole channel."

It was heavier than it looked: a bronze hand gripping a fluted stem, the cup of the flame ringed with a little iron crown. Someone had scratched a line of lettering into the base with a nail, and under the lamp Odile could make out a dollar sign rubbed almost smooth, and beneath it a striped pattern of rays cut so finely they looked like wet hair.

"Ten shillings," she said.

"Twenty."

"Ten, and you tell me who really had it."

He laughed, then stopped, because the shop bell over the door had begun to ring by itself, slow and steady, as though someone out in the dark were pulling a rope. Odile reached for the torch. The metal was warm, the way a hand stays warm after it has held something a long time, and when she looked up, the bell-rope man had gone, and the window showed only the river, bright with a single flame moving upstream.