Tattoo design of the words Never Lose Your Flames in bold script lettering inside a flame shape, shaded from red at the top to black at the base.

Never Lose Your Flames lettering in a flame

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design with the words Never Lose Your Flames in bold, brush-style script, set inside a flame silhouette. The flame edges have layered, licking strokes and the lettering has a slightly distressed texture. The gradient runs from bright red at the top to near black at the bottom, against a plain white background.

Lettering Flame Fire Script Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The coal merchant from Hebden came up the lane on the Tuesday before Christmas with his cap in his hands and a figure scribbled on the back of a feed sack. He looked past me at the forge, at the bellows Dad had patched with three different leathers, and said the anvil would fetch more as scrap than I'd ever make shoeing horses for the Hallam farms. I told him I'd think on it. He said the offer would keep until the thaw. I watched his van go and didn't go back inside for a while.

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Dad had lettered the words over the forge door himself, in red lead that had weathered to pink. Never lose your flames. When I was small I thought it was about the kettle, because he said it every morning as he lit the fire under the tea. Later I took it for a joke about his temper. He never explained it, and I never asked, and by the time I understood it was meant as a warning, he had been dead four winters and the hearth had been going out a little more each year.

That night I took the rake to the grate. Under the grey crust there was nothing but cold clinker and the smell of wet iron, and I nearly gave up. Then, low at the back where the bricks still held a little warmth, I found one red eye no bigger than a lentil. I fed it a curl of birch bark, then a splinter of ash, then my own breath through a length of pipe until it spread and caught. The bellows wheezed. The anvil ticked as it warmed, the way it always had.

In the morning the merchant's van stopped at the gate, and he stood looking at the chimney smoke for a long time before he came up the path. I didn't need to say anything. I held the door open and let the heat roll out into the snow, and he took his cap off again, though this time it was for the warmth.