Black and white stencil design of an armoured figure in a segmented power suit with a large arm cannon, shown in a running pose.

Armoured figure with arm cannon stencil

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of an armoured humanoid figure in a running pose, with a large round arm cannon raised to the front and a helmet with a rounded crest. The body is built from segmented, plate-like shapes separated by thin white gaps, giving a stencil or cut-paper effect. The plain white background gives strong contrast, and there is no colour.

Armour Figure Helmet Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harrower cut the plates for the suit the way her father had taught her, paper first. She laid cartridge paper over an offcut of bulkhead, traced each segment with a grease pencil, then slit the paper with a craft knife until the shapes stood apart like the scales of a fish. Only after that did she touch the steel.

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The commission came from a salvage master called Oswin Pryce, who wanted a diving suit that could walk a wreck bed without the weight of the water folding it up. He wanted a round barrel on the forearm for shearing wire off propellers. Nell told him it was a daft thing to ask of a suit and charged him double for it.

She kept every gap a finger's width. When the plates lay out across the shop floor, the suit looked like something drawn in one stroke of black and left white at its seams. Oswin came in with his cap in his hands, stood over it for a long time, and asked where the light was supposed to go.

Nell said it went through the seams, the way it goes through a stencil, and that was the whole trick of it. On launch morning the tide was high and grey. They lowered the suit off the quay on a chain, plate by plate, the barrel catching what sun there was. When it touched the water the white seams flashed like a line of gulls turning, and then it was under, still moving.