Back of a person's neck showing a red and orange flame-like tattoo with tapering, sweeping lines, placed at the centre of the neck below the hairline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and orange flame tattoo on the neck

Neck · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a neck showing a tattoo of stylised flames or feathers in bold, tapering strokes. The design is built from sweeping curved lines that narrow to points, shaded with bands of red, orange and yellow ink. It sits centrally below the hairline against plain skin, with a dark top and gravel background.

Neck Flame Feather

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle had boiled dry twice before Mr Pryor came down the back stairs with his trunk on one shoulder, swearing at the bannister in the soft Yorkshire way he had. It was September, the season was over, and the last of the lodgers had gone. He had paid through to the end of the month in coins he counted onto my kitchen table one at a time, as though each one were hot.

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He worked nights at the glassworks down by the harbour, where the furnace roared until dawn and the men ate their dinners standing up. Some mornings he came back with burns on his forearms and a look on him like he'd been to chapel. He showed me once how he drew a gather from the pot and turned it in the air, and the molten colour ran from red to amber to a yellow so pale it hurt to look at, tapering to a point like a feather pulled from a bird on fire. "It won't stay a shape you choose," he said. "You have to let it pull."

The morning he left, the wind off the sea was fierce and the sky was white as paper. He pressed something into my palm wrapped in a handkerchief: a long shard of red glass, thin as a knife blade, its tip sharp enough to draw blood. "Hold it to the window," he said, and he was gone down the front path before I had unwrapped it.

I did. Each morning now the sun comes through the front parlour and throws a flame up the wallpaper, red at the base, fading to gold, licking upward to a single point. Guests ask me what it is. I tell them it's a bird that went through a fire and kept its shape.