Realistic tattoo of plate armour with a fleur-de-lis emblem and chainmail covering a shoulder and upper arm, shown from two angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Armour pauldron and chainmail on shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with a shoulder plate decorated with raised scrollwork and a central fleur-de-lis, with rivets along its edges. Below it, chainmail rings wrap down the arm, and the shading gives the metal a convincing three-dimensional sheen. The ink is mostly grey and black with muted reddish and pink tones on the plate, and the two photographs show the same piece from different angles.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Armour Fleur-de-lis Scrollwork Rivet

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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

The holdall came off the 6.40 from Crewe on a wet Tuesday in February, and nobody claimed it, so it ended up with me in the lost property cupboard under the stairs at Hollinbrook station. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff with age, was a shoulder plate. It was heavier than it looked and cold as a churchyard gate, with a fleur-de-lis raised at its centre and rivets marching along the edge like stitches.

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I took it home on the last train, which I should not have done. Mr Okonedo, who ran the forge behind the goods yard before the yard closed, once told me a pauldron was made for a man who expected to be hit. I laid it on my kitchen table and rubbed the scrollwork with a brass brush until the reddish oxide in the grooves showed through like old rust on a blade. I thought about the chain that should have hung beneath it, and about who had mended the links.

Three weeks later a woman came to the counter asking for a grey canvas holdall. She knew its weight before I lifted it down. She said her father had carried that plate through two wars and a flood, and that he had left it on a bench because he could no longer manage the weight, and because he wanted someone to have to wonder what it was for.

I did not give her the plate. I gave her a ticket and a cup of tea, and we sat by the window while the trains came and went, neither of us saying what the armour had been for.