Colour tattoo of an armoured winged female warrior with a sword and red cape, covering the upper arm in a neo-traditional style.

Armoured winged warrior on an upper arm sleeve

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A long-haired female warrior in silver armour and a flowing red cape stands holding a sword, with feathered wings rising behind her. The linework is bold and the shading is soft grey, with colour concentrated in her golden hair, the red cape and the metallic armour details. The figure is centred on the arm and the background clouds fade into grey wash around her.

Neo-trad Upper arm Warrior Woman Angel Wing Sword Armour Cape Cloud Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smith at Hollin Cross had one good sword left, and he had promised it to nobody. On the morning his son was to marry the miller's girl, a woman came up the valley road with the wind in her hair and wings folded behind her like a cloak of gulls. Her armour was silver and worn thin at the elbows, and a red cape hung from her shoulders and snapped in the rain. She asked for the sword above the forge door.

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"What do you want with it?" the smith asked. "I am sent to stand at the church door," she said, "because a wedding is a gate, and gates are where the wicked come through." He laughed, because the church was only a barn with a bell, and the rain had turned the lane to mud. But the bride's mother had seen the wings over the ridge, and she said nothing. She only put bread in the woman's hands.

All day the woman stood at the lych gate with the blade point down in the mud. When the fiddlers struck up and the dancing grew wild, a grey rider came over the moor with no face under his helm, asking for the bride by name. He reached the gate, and the woman lifted the sword. He laughed at her, and then he did not, because the blade was older than the valley and remembered every oath ever broken on that road.

He turned back into the fog and was seen no more. The smith found his sword that night, clean as a new pin, leaning against the forge with a single gold hair wound round the hilt. At the feast the miller's girl told everyone the story, and the smith said nothing, which is how he had always told the true ones.