Black and grey tattoo of an American flag with barbed wire wrapped across the stripes and a torn, distressed edge, on the upper arm.

Barbed wire and flag on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a torn American flag with barbed wire wrapped across its stripes, and the canton of stars sits at the upper right. Shading is black and grey, with heavy dark outlines and soft grey tones that give the fabric a rippled, weathered look. The design covers the outer upper arm and runs down towards the elbow, with dark, jagged shapes along the lower edge.

Upper arm American flag Star Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had taken the top third of the flag clean off the pole, so Ruth Amsel spent the first morning of the thaw on her knees in the barn with a sewing awl and a jar of wax, picking barbed wire out of the hem. Her son had strung the fence along the south forty the spring before, and the strands had snagged the cloth on every gust since. The stripes were the easy part. The red held its colour. It was the blue she worried about, the field where the stars had faded to the grey of old dishwater.

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Walt would have said leave it. He had said plenty of things over forty years, most of them about fence posts and the price of diesel, and he had never once taken the flag down in bad weather. She found the old receipt in his coat pocket, a list in pencil: wire cutters, staples, two rolls of tape. Underneath, in a hand that shook more each year, he had written, cut the rust, not the wire.

She stitched until her fingers cramped, then drove out to the fence line at dusk with the flag folded over the passenger seat. The barbs caught at the sleeve of her coat and she let them. Where the cloth had torn, she laced it through the wire itself, so the strands ran in and out of the stripes like a loom, and the holes stayed closed against the next wind.

By morning the flag hung from the top wire, rippling in long grey folds over the posts. A neighbour's truck slowed on the county road and stopped. Ruth lifted a hand from the porch, and the flag went on snapping above the fence, held in place by the very thing that had torn it.