Black and grey realism sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm showing a 1920s Cotton Club sign, gangsters with tommy guns, and a woman's portrait.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

1920s Cotton Club gangster sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The sleeve shows a 1920s Cotton Club sign at the top, a man in a fedora, and a figure aiming a tommy gun, with partial Little Italy lettering across the middle. Below are a vintage car and a city street scene, with a woman in a hat portrait near the lower edge. The shading is smooth and highly detailed in black and grey, and the photo shows four angles of the same arm.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Sign

Find an artist for this

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

The Cotton Club's sign was still buzzing when the kitchen door banged open and Sal Ferrante came through it at a run, tommy gun held low against his hip. Ada Morrow pressed herself against the running board of the black sedan and counted the seconds the way her mother had taught her to count stitches. Behind him the band kept playing, something slow with a trumpet that had not yet understood what had happened.

Keep reading

Marty Quill leaned out of the driver's window, fedora shoved back on his head, and swore at the engine for coughing. Two blocks over, the streetlamps of Little Italy were coming on one by one, and somewhere a woman was calling a boy in for supper. Sal threw the gun across the back seat and climbed in after it, his breath coming in short, sour bursts. Nobody mentioned the second man who had not come out of the kitchen.

They drove south with the windows down. Ada watched the city slide past: a tram bell, a newspaper boy shouting about the mayor, a shop window with a cardboard cutout of a film star in a wide-brimmed hat. At Canal Street Marty pulled in beside a hat shop that was just shutting and idled there while Sal lit a cigarette with hands that would not keep still.

Ada took the studio photograph of herself from her purse, the one taken the spring before, and held it against the glass until the lamplight made her look like somebody else. Then she let it drop into the gutter. Sal didn't see. Marty never asked. By morning the papers would have a different name in the second column, and the club would have a new band, and she would still be the one doing the counting.