Small traditional-style tattoo of a dark grey storm cloud with an orange lightning bolt on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Storm cloud and lightning bolt on a hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a grey, dotted storm cloud with black outlines sits on the back of a hand, with an orange lightning bolt extending downwards from its base. The cloud is shaded in dark grey and black with a textured, speckled effect, while the bolt is filled with flat orange and outlined in black. The subject is centred on a plain, lightly lit background with the hand filling most of the frame.

Traditional Hand Lightning bolt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tent had been leaking since Lowestoft, and Mr Hollis insisted on calling it weather rather than neglect. Every night I climbed the rigging with a bucket of tar and a roll of oiled canvas, patching the holes the rain found, while below me the seats emptied a little more each week. We were down to forty paying people in a tent built for four hundred.

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The storm act was Ines's. She stood at the centre of the ring with two copper rods and a jar that crackled, and when the drum rolled she raised her arms and the air above her split with a white fizz. It was mostly sleight of hand, but the children screamed in the right places. On the side of the lorry Mr Hollis had painted a cloud like a bunch of grapes, dotted and grey, with a bolt slashing down from it in orange, because orange was the only paint he could afford in quantity.

On the last night in Harwich the generator died halfway through the drum roll. The ring went black. Somebody's child started crying, and I heard the seats creak as people reached for their coats. Ines did not stop. She struck a match, held it high in both hands, and walked the circle while I lit every torch in the wardrobe, one after another, until the canvas glowed like the underside of a cloud. Nobody left. Forty people sat in the dark and watched a girl with a match pretend she was the sky.

We struck the tent at dawn. I cut a square from the scorched edge of the canvas and kept it, grey-black and pocked with burn holes, a yellow streak where the flame had licked it. It is still in my coat pocket. When the sky goes that particular colour before rain, I take it out and hold it up to check.