Two colour traditional tattoos on forearms, one of a hand holding a lighter with a 'BEST' banner, the other a hand holding a joint with a 'BUDS' banner, both with cannabis leaves and red flowers.

Matching lighter and joint hand tattoos on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two matching tattoos sit on the inner forearms of separate arms, each showing a hand with a banner reading BEST or BUDS, a cannabis leaf and a red flower. The lines are bold and black, with flat solid fills in peach skin tones, blue, green and red. The photograph is taken from above, with a hand holding a joint in the lower left corner.

Traditional Forearm Hand Flame Flower Banner Lettering Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lighter had been Nan's, a blue plastic thing with a cracked wheel, and Maggie swore it had never once lit first time. We were sitting on the sea wall at Westgate with the tide coming in grey, trying to light a roll-up that had been rained on twice. Dev kept saying the wind was the problem. Maggie said the problem was Dev, and that Nan would have sorted it in one flick.

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We had got the tattoos the summer after our exams, in a back room above the chippy on the high street, because the man who ran it had gone to school with Maggie's cousin and did mates' rates. Dev wanted the banner to say something clever. I wanted BEST, because we had been best at everything since Year Seven, including detention, bunking off French and nicking cider from the Co-op. Maggie chose BUDS for her own arm and said it was the most Maggie thing anyone had ever done, which was meant as a compliment.

Years later Maggie moved to Leeds and Dev took a job on the ferries, and the lighter went into a kitchen drawer with the takeaway menus and the spare keys. Then one October she rang me from the wall, saying she was home for Nan's birthday and had found the thing in her coat. We sat there in the dusk, two grown women with faded ink and no real reason to be cold, and the wheel turned under her thumb.

It lit first time. Neither of us said anything about that, because we both knew what it meant, and Maggie held the flame up against the wind for a long while before she gave it back to me.