Black and grey bullet tattoos in a row on a forearm, with the words For the Fallen above them, as a hand holds a cartridge.

Bullet tattoos with For the Fallen on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm shows a row of drawn bullets in black ink, with outlined casings and shaded tips, running up the arm. The words For the Fallen are written in a handwritten script above the bullets. The hand below holds a loose cartridge over a magazine against a dark, softly focused background.

Forearm Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The windfalls come down thickest in the last week of August, when the Bramleys have had their fill of sun and let go all at once. My uncle Ray used to walk the rows at first light with a steel bucket, picking every bruised apple off the grass before the wasps found it. He called them the fallen. Nobody else called them that, and nobody asked him why.

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He had served in a regiment that went somewhere hot and came back quieter. When he died I found a biscuit tin in the potting shed full of spent brass, dozens of casings he had gathered from the ranges near Brecon and never mentioned. Some were green with age. He had scratched a name into the base of one with a nail. I didn't know the name, so I left it in the tin and took over the bucket myself.

This year the crop is poor. A frost in May took the blossom from the top rows, and the Bramleys hang small and hard. I stand at the gate counting windfalls in fifties, like rounds, while the wasps drift in loud and happy to the sweetest ones. Lily from the next farm brings her boy to help. He is nine and thinks it is a game, lining the good apples along the wall in neat ranks.

At dusk I tip the last bucket into the press and the juice runs gold across the lid of the tin. I wipe the casings clean with my sleeve and set them along the windowsill, bases up, where the low light comes through the trees. Ray would have said they were only metal. I think he would have liked them shining in the room where he kept the kettle on, the fallen all accounted for.