Black handwritten script lettering tattooed across the upper back near the shoulder, photographed from behind in a car.

Handwritten quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person seen from behind shows a line of thin black handwritten script across the upper back near the shoulder, reading "They put the spark in me, and now all it does is burn". The lettering has a loose, slightly uneven hand with fine, even strokes and solid black ink. The photograph is taken inside a car, with a white polka dot top and dark hair in the frame, and the tattoo is the clear focal point.

Lettering Back Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Tollgate House had been broken since March, so Nan Figgis carried her coals up the stairwell in a biscuit tin, nineteen flights, one hand on the rail and the other keeping the lid tight. The council had painted the walls the colour of weak tea. Nobody on the nineteenth floor had a fire any more, only radiators that knocked like someone wanting in.

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The coal had come from the lad in flat 4B, Tomas, who worked nights at the foundry and brought home offcuts of the furnace in his lunch pail. He gave her a lump on the Tuesday her husband was three weeks in the ground and the boiler had died along with him. 'Keep it going,' he said. 'Don't feed it too much.' She didn't understand him until the second winter, when the fire took everything she gave it: the letters from the housing office, the photographs, her good wool coat, the curtains her daughter had sewn for a flat that no longer existed.

She sat by it in the evenings and told the room, out loud, what they had done to her. The rent and the rooms and the men in suits who called her love. Each word went into the fire and came back out hotter, and the glow climbed up the walls like it had been waiting there all along. By spring the tin was empty and she was not.

When the lift was mended in June, nobody rode it. They took the stairs, one landing at a time, and left their lighters on the rail outside her door for her to find.