Black and grey realism tattoo of a chess queen and king on a checkered board above the letters XX, shown on the inner forearm in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chess queen and king on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a chess queen on the left and a chess king on the right, both standing on a checkered board with the letters XX beneath. The pieces are rendered with fine shading and highlights, and soft blurred dark and light shapes sit behind them. The image is in black and grey with a dark, warm-toned background, and the two side-by-side photos show the same design from slightly different angles.

Realism Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea took the rooks first, in the gale off the Horn, and then two pawns went over the rail while we were hauling the spare anchor chain. By the time we raised the Falklands the set had shrunk to a queen and a king, and the board had buckled so that its squares curled up at the corners like old bread.

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Mr Okonedo, our bosun, would not let anyone sweep them away. He sat at the saloon table with a tin mug of stewed tea and played them against himself, the queen moving bold while the king trudged after her. Twenty games, he told me, scratched into the board's edge with a marlin spike, one notch for every match he had lost to the dead ship's cook, a man who never once looked at the pieces.

I asked him, on the night the lamp swung so hard the oil slopped across the table, why he kept playing a game he could not win. He said a king is never the piece that wins. The queen does the work. The king only has to be seen standing there when it ends.

We made Valparaíso in the grey of a Tuesday. He gave me the queen and kept the king in his coat, and when I opened my palm on the quay the carved wood was warm from his pocket. I understood then that the notches meant nothing except that he had kept coming back to the table.