Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a sword with its blade broken into fragments, running down the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Broken sword across a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sword with an ornate hilt sits at the top of the forearm, with its blade split into several shard-like pieces that drift down towards the wrist. The linework is bold and the blades are filled with dense black shading and grey highlights to give them depth. The design is entirely black and grey against pale skin and a dark background, and the composition runs diagonally along the arm.

Blackwork Forearm Sword Blade Hilt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You heard the blade before you saw it: a flat crack, like green wood under a boot, and then the hush of two hundred people drawing breath at once. Old Teodor had been holding the sword across his palms for the closing trick, the one the bills called the Widow's Bow, and the steel had split a hand's width below the hilt. The hilt stayed in his fist. The rest went everywhere.

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You were the one sent to gather it, because you were the youngest and the lightest on your feet, and because the crowd would not stop staring at him long enough to see where the pieces fell. You went down on your knees in the sawdust by the lamp posts and picked up the shards one by one. Some were as long as your forearm. Some were no bigger than a fingernail and cut you before you knew they were there. You filled a tin that had once held tea and carried it back to the wagon with your sleeve pressed to your bleeding thumb.

Teodor would not let the smith mend it. He said a blade that has broken once remembers the break, and that to weld it would be to lie to the steel. So each night, after the last customer had gone and the generator coughed itself quiet, you lifted the pieces from the tin and laid them out on the trestle table in order, from the hilt to the point, leaving a gap between each so that the sword looked like it was coming apart in the water.

On the final night before the fair moved on to the coast, you laid out the last shard, the long thin one that tapered to nothing, and stepped back to look. The gaps ran down the table like pieces falling from a height, and you understood that nothing had been lost at all. Teodor reached past you and switched off the lamp, and in the dark the blade was still there, only spaced out, the way a thing is when it has been let go of carefully.