Black and grey tattoo across the shoulder and upper arm, showing torn skin revealing riveted metal armour plates above a Celtic knotwork cross.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic cross under torn armour plates

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, with skin rendered as ripped open to reveal curved, riveted metal plates and buckles beneath. A large Celtic cross with interlaced knotwork sits in a circular disc on the upper arm, drawn with bold black and fine grey shading. The image is a close, angled photograph in neutral lighting, with the rest of the torso and arm partly visible at the edges.

Shoulder Upper arm Torn skin Armour Rivet Knotwork Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come down since the bell at St Brannoc's, and by noon the stalls along Tanner Row sagged like wet sails. I was minding Aunt Vera's trestle, which held a crate of bent rivets and a dented helm nobody wanted, when the stranger came up the hill with a sack over one shoulder and the look of a man already cheated once today.

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He unrolled the sack on the boards without asking. Curved plates came out, dull grey and riveted at every seam, and one buckle with its tongue snapped clean. They were warm, which I hadn't expected. 'Carrick forge,' he said, 'before the fire.' Then he tapped the bronze disc Vera kept in her apron pocket, the one with the cross knotted inside it, and offered the whole lot for that. Vera had worn that disc for thirty years. I told him no. The rain kept on.

Then I looked closer at the knotwork. The line never ends. You can follow it round and round the cross and never find where it began, and the same loop was pressed into every plate beneath the rust. 'You don't wear armour to hide,' he said, not unkindly. 'You wear it so whatever's underneath knows the door is there.' I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, and the bell rang noon again, though it was already past one.

When I looked up he had gone. The sack was gone, the plates were gone, and the disc lay on the trestle beside the bent rivets, still wet with rain. I picked it up. It was warm, and the knot pulled at my thumb as if something on the other side wanted out.