Traditional colour tattoo of a winged staff with a coiled red hose, a crossed axe and hook, and a black helmet with a red band, on the upper arm.

Winged staff with axe and helmet on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A winged staff sits at the centre of the design, wrapped by a coiled red hose and crossed by a red-headed axe and a metal hook tool. A black helmet with a red stripe rests at the top between teal and gold wings. Bold black outlines, solid fills and vivid red, yellow, gold and teal ink give the piece a classic traditional look, shown from a close, slightly angled view.

Traditional Upper arm Wing Staff Helmet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hose kinked twice before Dolores got the nozzle to bite, and the wind coming off the flats kept shoving the flames back across the blacktop like a dog that would not be called. Ruben worked the pump without being asked, his eyes on the gauge and not on the orange wall climbing the fence line beyond the cattle grid.

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The truck was a tanker that had rolled on the bend near Carrow Wells, and whatever it had carried was now feeding the grass in long, greasy tongues. Captain Ines Halloran stood with her back to the heat and her axe on her shoulder, shouting numbers into the radio. Her father had carried the same hook tool on the old engine out of Barstow, and it hung now from her belt, the wooden handle worn pale where his hand had been. When the wind swung round at half past two, she used it to drag a smouldering fence post clear of the tarmac, and the sparks went up past the headlamps like thrown coins.

By four they had cut a firebreak with the axe and the spade, and the line held at the edge of the road. Nobody spoke much. Dolores sat on the tailboard with her gloves in her lap and watched the sky go from black to the colour of weak tea over the ridge.

Ines coiled the hose by hand, loop over loop, the way she had been taught, and found a scorch mark on the brass where the hook had rested against it. She hung the tool back on its rack, then picked up the spade again, because there was still a patch of grass ticking in the ditch, and somebody had to stand over it until it went quiet.