Realistic colour tattoo of a blue steel armour plate with a Celtic triquetra knot and scale mail, set within torn skin and flames on a man's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Armour plate and flames on an upper arm sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a blue-grey metal armour plate with a raised triquetra knot, rivets and a row of scale mail beneath, with the skin appearing torn open around it to reveal orange flames. The shading is smooth and highly detailed, giving the metal a glossy, three-dimensional finish. Blue and grey dominate the armour while the orange flames add warm contrast along the edges of the design, which wraps across the upper arm and shoulder of a man photographed in a studio with a torso and jeans visible.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Armour Triquetra Celtic knot Rivet Scale Flame Torn skin Metal

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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

Mind the kettle, the lock's still filling, so you've time for one more cup and one more story. This one came down to me from my grandmother, who had it from a lock-keeper who swore he'd seen the armour himself.

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Tobias Greave was the smith at Coldharbour Wharf, and he was the best the river ever had. In the winter of the great flood, Ansel Marrow, who ran the mill barges, came to him with a commission and a purse heavy enough to make the coins sing. He wanted a pauldron for his shoulder, a plate of blue steel that would turn a boathook or a broken oar. Tobias said yes before Ansel had finished his sentence.

He worked three weeks. He hammered a triquetra into the boss, three looping arms with no beginning and no end, and he set the rivets in a ring as neat as lock-keeper's buttons. Beneath the plate he hung scale mail, each ring of it cool as river water. On the last night the forge roared so high the cat fled the barn. When he quenched the plate the water boiled off in a shriek, and the steel came out glowing like a sunset. Tobias never said what he saw in the fire, but he went quiet after that.

Ansel refused to pay. He said the thing was hot enough to raise blisters, and no sensible man wears a flame on his arm. So Tobias strapped the pauldron on his own shoulder and walked the towpath to the river. Where the steel met his skin the fire rose up through it, and it has been burning under that bank ever since. Check your stern lamp tonight. If it throws orange on the water, that's Tobias, still waiting for someone to pay him.