Black ink tattoo of a matchstick with a stippled smoke trail rising across the forearm, drawn in fine line and dotwork.

Matchstick with dotted smoke trail

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an outlined matchstick with a small circular head, its stick drawn in fine black linework. A trail of stippled dots rises from the head and curves up and to the right, fading as it extends across the skin. The image is a close, slightly angled photograph of a forearm against a striped top, with the design centred in the frame and rendered in black ink only.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that wall, the one with the lichen, and stop picking at the windfalls, they'll give you the wind. Now. My grandfather kept a box of red-headed matches in his waistcoat pocket, the kind that went off with a crack like a stick across a knee. The orchard then ran all the way down to the river, forty-one trees of Bramley and Cox and one old Blenheim nobody would put a price on.

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It was the August the rain never came. The Harkness boys had cut the grass on the far slope and left it lying in windrows, and that evening they set it going. The smoke should have gone straight up, but the wind came off the water and laid it flat along the rows like a dog settling in for the night. Folk on the lane thought the barns were alight. Somebody rang the bell at Ashby Mill.

He was only lighting his pipe, mind. He struck one match on the stile and let it burn down to his thumb, because that was how he did everything, slow and stubborn. The smoke from that small flame went up thin and grey, then bent over the top of the apples and wandered off towards the church, as if it had an errand there and had only just remembered it.

By the time the Harkness boys came up the path with buckets, the slope had nothing left to burn. There was a single black stick lying on the stones and a long, unhurried thread of smoke leaving the orchard for good. He picked the stick up, put it in his pocket, and kept it there until the day they buried him.