Realistic shaded tattoo of layered armour plates with rivets covering a shoulder and upper arm, in brown and grey tones.

Armoured shoulder plate tattoo

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a shoulder pauldron made of overlapping armour plates, with rivets along the top strap and a curved, segmented edge running down the upper arm. The plates are rendered with soft shading, highlights and dark recesses to give a three-dimensional metallic look. The ink is mainly muted brown and tan with grey shadows, and the design fills the shoulder and upper arm from the collarbone area down the outside of the arm.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Armour Rivet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm sent me down to the forge the week the pass snowed shut, with a pauldron wrapped in sacking and a note that said only: the rivets are loose. I unwrapped it on the bench under the lamp. Scalloped plates, the colour of strong tea and old bread, the top strap riveted in three places. Someone had oiled it well, which told me the owner had kept it long after he stopped needing it.

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The abbey cellar had been a granary once. Now it held the armour of men who had climbed the valley to be forgiven and had stayed to pray. Nobody asked me whose it was. I drove out the first rivet with a punch and found the leather lining scratched with a name and a village I had never heard of, and beneath them a date from the winter the bell was recast. The man had been young when he wrote it, or his hand had been.

The rivets were not loose. Someone had set them so the plate could be lifted free in a single movement, the way a man sheds a cloak when he has decided not to fight. I understood then why the oil was fresh and the edges were kept sharp. He had meant to come back for it and had not.

I refitted the strap and left the top rivet a little slack, as he must have wanted it. Then I hung the pauldron on the peg beside the chapel door, where the brothers pass on their way to vespers, and went back down to the fire to finish the hinges for the gate.