Black and grey outline tattoo of an abstract blade-like shape with a leaf-like tip, shaded in grey, on a person's shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract blade shape on shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a long, curved bar with a pointed leaf-like tip at the upper left and a sweeping, hooked tail at the lower right. Thin black outlines define the edges, with soft grey shading along the inner body of the shape. The photograph is taken close up at an angle, with the design running diagonally across the shoulder blade area.

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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

...and so the snow had been falling on Hollin Stoop for three days, the lamp oil was running low, and the carter who had come in off the top road sat with his boots steaming by the fire and asked me what the blade was for. Sit still, I told him. You're asking the wrong question. A blade is only ever waiting to be told what it's for.

Keep reading

Old Ada Brannock kept a forge at the bottom of the valley, and in the hard winter the beck froze to glass, the parish asked her for a hook to cut the sedge along the fold path. She had no good iron. What she had was a broken wagon tyre and a stubborn temper. She heated the tyre white, drew it out long and thin, and bent it over her knee until it curved like the back of a swan's neck. Then she pinched a leaf point at one end so the cut would start clean, and drew a hooked tail at the other so that whatever it reaped would be caught and not left to fall.

The parish never paid her. The hook went to the sedge-cutter's son, who used it every spring to clear the path, and in time the path became a road, and the road went over the top to this inn where you are sitting now. Travellers passed the thing hung on the wall and took it for a gate-latch or a bit of old harness. None of them asked who had bent it.

So that is the blade, friend. It was never for killing anything. It was for the thing that grows back, which is the only work worth a blade's time. Now pass me that cup, and mind the snow on your collar.

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