Red, black and grey traditional-style tattoo on an upper arm, with black wings, a yin yang style swirl, a red demon face and the words Angel and Demon.

Angel and demon wings on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bold tattoo shows a yin yang style swirl containing a red demon face with yellow eyes, flanked by black feathered wings. The words Angel and Demon appear in script at the top, with a column of 666 and similar numerals above the centre. Heavy black outlines and red and yellow fills dominate, with grey and black shading in the wings and lower edge, and the design fills the frame of the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Angel Demon Wing Yin yang Number Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hand the tally book to the new lad on Saltcoat quay because your fingers have stopped trusting the pencil. Six crates of cod, six, six, the numbers climbing the page like barnacles up a hull. Skipper Dunn always said the sea keeps its own accounts and the dock office keeps the other sort, and a man who mixes the two ends up in the wrong column.

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Forty years of it, and you still sort the catch by the light. Morning fish go silver side up, the deep trawl hauls come in grey and red gilled, the colour of a dying coal. The radio in the wheelhouse reads the shipping forecast in a voice like a stone being turned over. Twelve years since the Mary Ellen went down off the Dogger, and you still count her crew in your sleep: six men, six lamps, and the sixth lamp always burns a little brighter than it should.

The offer came last week, folded into the wages envelope: half a share in a new boat if you sign before the spring tides. Dunn's widow pushed it across the kitchen table with a teacup and a look. Angel on one side of the ledger, the note said, demon on the other. Choose the margin you can live with.

So you go down to the slip at dusk, where the water turns the colour of tin, and set the book on a bollard. The wind takes the first page, then the rest. You watch the numbers lift over the harbour wall like a flock of starlings, black wings beating, and you do not follow them.