Traditional style colour tattoo of an open lighter decorated with a red rose and green leaves, with a small flame above it, on a lower leg.

Lighter with rose and flame on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A lighter with its lid open sits at the centre of the design, with a red rose and green leaves on its side panel and a small red and green flame rising from the wick. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the lighter body is filled with grey and dark tones. Red and green ink dominate the palette against the pale skin, and the design is framed on a lower leg.

Traditional Calf Rose Flame Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lighter was still in the coat pocket where Uncle Ray always kept it, between the bus pass and a boiled sweet wrapped in cellophane. I nearly put it in the bag for the charity shop. Then the lid flicked up with a sound like a small door opening, and the wick caught on the first turn of the wheel.

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Nobody in the family had ever said much about the rose. It was painted down the side in red and green, worn pale at the petals where his thumb had rubbed it for forty years, and one corner was dented by something heavier than a pocket. Mum said he'd bought it off a stall at the Hull Fair in 1979 for a girl called Maureen who went to Canada and never wrote back. Ray said he'd bought it for himself, because a man should own one good thing.

I spent the evening on his front step with the lid open, lighting nothing, listening to the wick hiss. The street lamps came on one by one down Beverley Road. Across the way, Mrs Okafor lit a candle in her front window for her husband, and I thought about how long a small flame can be kept going by people who never meet.

In the morning I put the lighter in my own pocket and left the sweet where it was. Some things you carry because they still work, and some because someone was careful with them. I hadn't decided which this was until the bus came and I found I was already flicking the wheel again, just to watch the flame lean toward the door.