Red flame-like linework arcs around the kanji 愛 (love) in a tattoo design drawing on a plain white background, with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red flame lines framing the kanji for love

Colour · Flash

A line drawing of a tattoo design on a plain white background. Thin, tapering red strokes curve outwards and downwards like flames or wings, with a bold red kanji character 愛 meaning love sitting at the centre. The design is a single flat red colour with no shading.

Kanji Flame Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you, and mind the dog, he has no manners. No, not that one, the grey. Now. Dorcas Vane kept the lamp on Scarra Head the winter her man went out after the herring and didn't come back in with them. Everyone said the sea had him. Dorcas said the sea had only his boat, and a boat can be talked round.

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She went down to the shore with a tin of red ochre she used for marking the nets and a stick of charred alder. On the wet bow of his boat she drew the sign she'd seen on the tea chest from the Chinese merchant in Stornoway, the one that means love, though nobody on the island could say it properly. She didn't know the strokes. She drew them anyway, and round them she drew flames, thin and bent like the wings of a gull coming in low, because that was the only fire she had to give him.

Three nights she sat up with the lamp and the tin. On the fourth morning the wind swung round and the boat came over the bar on the top of the tide, low in the water, with her man and his brother aboard, the herring rotting in the hold and both of them alive.

The mark is still on the bow. Rain won't wash it. Ask the old boatbuilder if you doubt me, though he'll tell you it was the paint, and he'll be lying, because I was the one who held the tin.