Black ink flash design of a symmetrical vertical motif with sweeping feather-like shapes and five circular emblems showing flame, hand, scales, eye and tree.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical blackwork design with five circular emblems

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design with bold black feather or flame-like shapes sweeping outward from a central column. Five circular emblems are stacked down the centre, showing a flame, a hand, a set of scales, an eye and a tree. The linework is solid black with fine white detail cut into the shapes, on a plain white background.

Blackwork Flame Hand Scale Eye Tree Feather Emblem Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift stuck again at ten past three, the way it always did when the new porter wheeled the linen trolley past the doors. Edna Pryce pressed the button twice, then sat down on the floor of the corridor with her back to the wall, because there was nothing else to do until the cable decided otherwise.

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He had come up from the basement in March with a canvas holdall gone stiff with old wax. Inside were five tin discs no wider than a saucer, each pressed with a picture: a flame, a pair of open hands, a set of scales, an eye, and a tree with its roots showing. His grandmother had carried them off a boat, he said, and she had told him that each disc was spent once, by whoever sat up with a stranger who had no one else coming.

Edna did not believe him, but she took the flame the night old Mr Hadley in bay four kept asking for heat that the radiators would not give. She took the hands for the girl who held a dying man's fingers through the rails until dawn, and the scales for the two sons who argued over a biscuit tin of letters until one of them cried. The eye went to the agency nurse who could not stop watching the monitors and needed someone to watch her instead.

When the holdall was light and only the tree was left, the porter came back up the stairwell, breathing hard, and sat beside her in the corridor. He did not ask for it. Edna turned the tin over in her palm and found the roots were warm from her hand, and somewhere below them the lift cable finally gave a long, tired hum and began to move.