Black barbed wire tattoo wrapping vertically around the upper arm of a person wearing a green top, with the arm raised and flexed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Barbed wire band on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black barbed wire design runs vertically across the upper arm, with twisted strands and small sharp barbs. The linework is solid and uniform, with no visible shading or colour. The arm is raised and flexed toward the camera against a pale background, with the tattoo placed near the centre of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the nettles. You want to know why the wire runs up through the old keep at Greywater? I'll tell it the way my nan told it, and she had it from someone who was there.

Keep reading

When the last Lord Harrowby came home from the wars, he found his hall empty and his fields gone to brambles. Only the gatehouse still stood, and in it lived a widow called Maud Penrose, who kept three goats and a grudge. She had watched his men take her son for the levy and never bring him back. So when Harrowby came asking for rent, she told him to take it from the stones.

He did not like being refused. That night he strung a length of wire from the old well to the battlements, twisted tight and studded with thorns, and swore it would bind the valley to his name. Every morning it was longer. Every morning the goats broke through the gap in the hedge, and every morning Maud mended it with her bare hands and a pair of pliers from her husband's box.

Now here is the part they leave out in the books. The wire grew thorns on the side facing the village and smooth wire on the side facing the castle. Harrowby walked into it at dusk one winter, trying to cut through with his sword, and it held him fast until the frost came. They found him in spring, one arm raised as if to hail someone, the thorns gone green with moss.

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