Coloured pencil flash sheet of blue smoke-like spirit figures with large eyes and one red flame design, drawn as tattoo sketches.

Smoke and flame spirit designs on a sheet

Mixed · Flash

A sheet of hand-drawn tattoo flash showing several cartoon smoke spirits with large round eyes, drawn in blue pencil, plus one tall red flame design in the centre. The linework is soft and sketchy with shading built up in layers, and the wispy outlines curl and taper across the white page. The sheet is mostly blue with a single red element, and the designs are arranged loosely with no body or skin visible.

Smoke Flame Spirit Cartoon Eye

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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

Mind the gap in the hedge, Tom, or the smoke will have you by the ankles. There, that's the one. Now sit where I can see your face, because this is the true part, and the true part is always told sitting down.

Keep reading

Up past the charcoal pits, where the beeches give out and the bracken starts, there lived a flame called Old Ember. She was the colour of a fox's belly and as tall as the kiln, and every night she tended the burners' fires so the wood turned to black and no further. Round her feet drifted the little ones, the smoke children, blue as skimmed milk, with eyes as round as shillings. They had no homes but the air, and they liked nothing better than to hang about the chimneys of Hollin Cross and peer in at the suppers.

One October the burners felled the last of the old oaks, and the smoke children saw the village lamps for the first time and wanted to go down. Ember said no. A fire that leaves its hearth goes out, she told them, and the smoke that follows it goes thin and grey and forgets its own name. But the smallest, a sprite with a curl of hair like a wave on the Humber, slipped her grip and drifted down the lane in the dark.

She found the Abbotts' cottage, where a girl lay awake because her bread had burned and she could not sleep for shame. The sprite pressed its face to the glass, and the girl, who was not afraid of anything, pressed hers back. Ember never came down that lane herself. She didn't need to. Every night since, she has sent a little blue sprite to the chimneys, and the girl leaves the sash open a crack so it can come in and warm its hands. Some winters the whole of Hollin Cross breathes blue at dusk, and if you stand at the top of the lane you can see the eyes in the smoke looking back at you, and somewhere up in the trees a red light, keeping count.