Black and grey realism tattoo sleeve on an upper arm and forearm showing a crowned religious figure, a veiled woman holding rosary beads, and a revolver on the chest.

Black and grey religious realism sleeve with revolver

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man shows a full sleeve tattoo of a bearded figure wearing a crown of thorns, a veiled woman with a rosary, and a cherub-like face. A revolver and a further child-like face are tattooed across the chest and shoulder. The work uses soft grey shading and fine tonal gradation in black ink, with the sleeve wrapping from the upper arm down to the wrist.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Shoulder Chest Veil Rosary Revolver Cherub Portrait

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down nearer, you with the cough, and mind the tent pole. This is the tale of Ada Whitlow's banner, which hung at the Michaelmas fair in Kettering for forty years and never once sat straight. She painted it herself in the back of a wagon, saints on one side and the shooting gallery on the other, because her husband Tom said a fair needed a bit of God and a bit of gunpowder, and she was not going to argue with him in front of the customers.

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The trouble started the summer the painter's son came home from the war with a steady hand and no appetite for either. He would sit under the banner of a night and sketch the faces that came to the rail: a girl with a rosary wound through her fingers, a boy with cheeks like a cherub's, a man who had lost his brother in the mud and wanted the thorns to stop hurting him. Ada let him work in grey, because colour cost money and grey was all the lamps could show.

Then came the night the gallery's revolver went missing. Tom swore it was the usual trick the stallholders play on each other. But when the banner came down in October, folded like a flag at a funeral, the revolver lay wrapped in the veil of the Madonna, cold and oiled, with a single bead pressed into its grip.

Nobody at the fair spoke of it again, and Tom never found the bullets. Ada kept the banner in a trunk, and the boy went to sea. Keep your pennies, and mind the step on your way out.