Two carved wooden arm and hand boards showing traditional-style tattoo designs of skulls, a heart with a dagger, a goat, a cat and flowers, in black and cream.

Carved arm boards with skull, goat and cat designs

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

Two carved wooden boards in the shape of a forearm and hand sit on a dark wooden surface. Each arm holds a tattoo-style design of skulls, a heart, a dagger, flowers, chains, a goat and a cat, with short Cyrillic lettering. The black ground and cream outlines give the carvings a bold, high-contrast graphic look.

Traditional Forearm Hand Skull Heart Dagger Goat Cat Flower Chain Lettering Arm Hand

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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

The goat has got into the lean-to again, and you hear her before you see her, knocking the feed bins with her horns while the snow comes sideways past the barn door. The boards lie clamped on the bench where you left them. For three days you have cut the same outline, the wrist bent just so, the fingers spread like a man reaching for a dropped coin, and each time the gouge slips at the knuckle you swear and start again.

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Your uncle Pavel carved the sign for the cooperative for thirty years, and he taught you that wood remembers the first wrong cut. The cat goes on last, he said, because cats never come when called. You have painted the black ground twice with the tar his father used to mix for the gates. The skulls came easily. The heart with its dagger took a whole evening, and the lettering took longer, because you copied it from a scrap of paper a lorry driver left in the cab last spring, and you are not sure of every word.

On the fourth night the goat stands in the doorway with a split bale of straw caught on her horns like a crown, and you laugh until you have to sit on the upturned bucket. Snow melts off her back in dark patches. You look at the cream outlines, finally even, and understand that the boards were never for the cooperative. Someone in town wants their arm cut into wood so it can hang where the winter light falls.

In the morning the goat has eaten the scrap of paper. You stand at the bench with the chisel in your hand and realise you will have to invent the last words yourself. You write them the way they ought to sound, a little wrong, and the goat, chewing, seems to approve.