Colour tattoo of a bright sparkler with stars and the words just a spark in black script on the inner forearm, in the neo-traditional style.

Sparkler with stars and script on an arm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The design shows a radiating starburst with a pink and yellow centre, surrounded by outlined five-pointed stars, dots and short rays. A sparkler stick runs diagonally down to a pink heart, with a dotted yellow trail curling beneath it, and the phrase just a spark is written in black script across the top. Bold black outlines contrast with pink, orange, yellow and teal fills on pale skin, with a plain white background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the toffee on your sleeves. No, Alfie, the fire won't jump at you. Now. The winter the harbour wall cracked, Mags Pennock ran the firework stall behind the chip shop, and she had one rule: nobody lit a thing until she'd counted it out loud.

Keep reading

Her nephew Teddy was nine and had never once waited for a count. He had a box of sparklers under his jumper and a notion that the stars on the lamp posts were tired and needed waking. So when the power went out along Quay Street and the lighthouse on the point stopped turning, he went down the slipway with a sparkler in each fist and the matches in his teeth.

Out past the breakwater a little boat was coming home without a lamp. Its keeper, old Haskett, could see nothing but black water and his own nerves. Teddy scratched the match, held the first sparkler high, and waved it the way you'd wave at a train. It threw out gold sparks and a crooked star, then another, and then the whole harbour wall was spitting light. The boat turned toward the noise like a moth at a porch bulb.

Mags found him at the end of the slipway with his wrist burnt red and nothing left in his hand but a stub. She didn't shout. She counted the sparks stuck to his jumper, one, two, three, the way she always did, and said, "Well. That was only a spark, wasn't it." Teddy grinned for a week after, and the lighthouse came back on before Sunday.

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