Black and grey realism tattoo of cracked armour plates, a winged Celtic cross and chainmail across the upper arm and shoulder, shown in four photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Armour and winged Celtic cross on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A collage of four photographs shows a sleeve-style tattoo across the shoulder and upper arm, depicting metal armour plates with a winged Celtic cross at the centre of the pauldron. Below the plates, chainmail is rendered in fine textured linework, and the skin appears torn away at the edges to reveal the armour beneath. The piece uses soft grey shading and highlights in black and grey ink, with the lighting giving the metal a three-dimensional look.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Armour Wing Torn skin

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

Shut the shutters, Maud, and bring the good candle close, for this is the one about the mail-maker of Dunmere, and it does not care for draughts. Mind the snow at the sill. It came over the pass the winter the bells froze, the kind that buries a door before supper.

Keep reading

Old Tobin Reel worked iron in a smithy at the foot of the hill, and he made mail the way other men made prayers, one ring at a time and never hurried. In the February of that year a stranger knocked with a mule and no coin, asking for a shoulder piece. He wanted plates hammered thin as a sermon, and over them a cross with wings, the old knotted kind the monks cut into their gravestones. Tobin asked him why a soldier wanted wings. The stranger said only that he had been promised them by someone who was now dead.

It took nine days. Tobin beat the plates while his wife, Ysolde, worked the bellows and sang the wrong words to the right tune, and each evening the drifts climbed higher against the forge door. On the last night the cross was finished, and the stranger buckled the pauldron on, and the rings settled against him quietly, as if they had been waiting. In the morning the mule was gone and so were the tracks. The stranger's coat lay folded on the anvil with a single ring in its pocket, still warm.

Ysolde found the armour gone from the anvil, and the wings were never seen again. Tobin kept the forge shut after that, and no smith in Dunmere will sell you a cross with wings. Blow out the candle now, Maud. The snow has stopped, and the door is clear.