Colour tattoo of a waving American flag with blue star field and wisps of grey shading across a forearm, with a person in jeans and a skull belt buckle behind.

American flag design on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A waving American flag fills the forearm, with red and white stripes on the left and a blue field of white stars on the right. Dark grey and black shading and outlines give the flag a billowing, smoky edge, with soft highlights on the red stripes. The forearm is shown across the frame against a pale grey pavement, with the wearer's jeans and skull belt buckle at the lower left.

Neo-trad Forearm American flag Star Stripe Flag Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flag had been flying over Hadley's orchard since the spring Tom came home from Lakenheath with it rolled in a cardboard tube. He nailed it to the barn gable without asking anyone, and by the end of August it was more rag than cloth. The wind came up off the valley through the Bramley rows and worried the bottom edge into long grey tongues, so the red stripes looked like they were trying to leave the pole in a hurry.

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I was nineteen the summer Tom's knees gave out. He handed me the ladder and a bucket of windfalls for the wasps and said the thing wanted taking down before the equinox gales. "Fold it right," he said from his deckchair under the damson. "Stars up. Always stars up, whoever's looking."

The cloth came away in my hands like wet paper. Behind the top corner, where the flag had hung over the gable board for half a century, someone had scratched two sets of initials into the wood. T.H. 1968 was deep and certain. Beneath it, smaller and shakier, D.H. 1971 had been cut with a penknife that slipped. I stood on the ladder with the wasps circling my ears and understood that Tom had a brother nobody mentioned, and that the flag had been hung twice, once for each of them.

I carried it down folded in thirteen neat squares, blue field outermost, the faded stars facing up toward the sky. Tom didn't ask how it looked. He only held out his hand, and when I gave him the flag he laid it across his knees and pressed his palm flat over the stars, as if checking they were still there.