Upper arm and shoulder tattoo of a chevron emblem inside a dark metal ring with a central gem, with cyan cracks running across the chevron.

Chevron emblem in a cracked metal ring

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a chevron shape set inside a heavy, ornate ring with a mechanical, armour-like frame, and a faceted gem sits at the base. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with grey tones giving the metal a raised, dimensional look. Cyan cracks and a pinkish tint in the gem provide the only colour against the black and grey.

Upper arm Shoulder Chevron Emblem Ring Gem Crack Metal Armour

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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 windfalls have started to split on the grass by the third row, and you are kneeling in the wet, prising a ring of grey metal out of the roots of an old Conference pear tree. Your uncle's ladder leans against the trunk where he left it on Tuesday. The ring is the size of a cartwheel, heavier than it looks, and someone has set a chevron into its centre like a rooftop pointing at the sky. Cyan threads run through the cracks in the chevron, faint as lightning in a jar. When you rub a thumb across the gem at its foot, the pink in it warms against your palm.

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Your uncle calls from the gate that the tractor needs moving before the rain. You don't answer. Instead you tilt the ring toward the low sun and count the notches around its rim, the way he taught you to count apple rows, and you find eleven. Eleven is wrong. The ring has twelve clasps on the outer edge, one for each month the orchard keeps its books, and the twelfth is empty, its socket crusted with sap that never came from any tree you know.

By dusk the cracks have brightened. You carry the ring up the lane in the crook of your arm, past the cider barn and the gate with its painted number, and the wasps lift off the fallen plums in a slow, indignant cloud. Behind you the orchard hums, though there is no wind. Your uncle is waiting at the kitchen door with a torch and an expression you have seen only once, the night your grandmother died.

You set the ring on the table between the jam jars. The chevron pulses once, and the gem goes white, then rose. Outside, the last pears drop in the dark, each one landing with the same small, careful sound, as if something beneath the grass is counting them too.