Black and grey shaded dollar sign with flames behind it, tattooed on a person's lower leg, likely the calf.

Shaded dollar sign with flames on a lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bold, blocky dollar sign sits centrally with tongues of flame rising behind it and curling up the sides. The design is rendered in black and grey with dark outlines, cast shadows and light highlights that give the symbol a raised, three-dimensional look. The tattoo fills the frame against warm skin, with a pale blue treated surface visible at the edges.

Calf Dollar sign Flame Money

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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

You have been up the ladder since seven, and the paint has crusted on your knuckles like scale. Doyle Pruitt wants the sign over his pawnshop redone before the county fair, and he wants the dollar sign fat enough to read from the bridge. You mix black with a little burnt umber because the old gold has gone to mud, then block out the S in square strokes, the way the sign writer in Dayton taught you before the war, letters built like bricks.

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Pruitt comes out with two cups of coffee and watches you shade the sides. "Make it look like it's burning," he says. "Not the money. The money's fine. Just the flame." You ask him why flames for a pawnshop. He laughs and says a man only pawns his watch when the house is already on fire, and some nights the whole street is. So you paint the tongues curling up behind the bars of the symbol, darkest at the base, with a pale grey highlight on each crest so the letters seem to stand off the board.

That night the boiler at the laundry two doors down gives out with a crack that rattles the glass in the Harlan Falls bank. Orange light climbs the street, and you stand on the bridge with the others while the fire crew shouts over the hiss of water. The pawnshop windows are black, but the sign holds, lit from below, its raised edges throwing shadows across the brick. Pruitt stands beside you in his shirtsleeves and says nothing at all.

In the morning the sign is still whole, scorched only at one corner of the flame. Pruitt counts out your wages on the counter, notes gone soft and slightly smoked at the edges. He folds them into your palm. "Good work," he says. "Paint holds up better than people do." You put the money in your pocket and feel the warmth of it against your leg all the way home.