Black and grey realism tattoo of a star with a cracked skin effect, filled with words such as friendship and freedom, on the upper arm and shoulder.

Cracked star with words on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large star sits on the upper arm and shoulder, with its points appearing to break through a lifted, cracked surface of skin. Words including friendship, freedom, love, family and tolerance are set in a serif typeface inside the star, and some are cut off at the edges. The image is black and grey, with soft shading on the skin and fine detail in the lettering and cracks, and a small leafy plant tattoo sits near the top of the shoulder.

Realism Lettering Upper arm Shoulder Star Word Freedom Love Family Leaf Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Wilf had the banner laid across two trestles in the club room when you came in with the paste bucket, and he didn't look up. "Lodge wants the star by Friday," he said. "Mind the join, it's been folded since nineteen seventy-two." The canvas smelled of damp dust and old tobacco. Someone had pencilled the mottoes in before him, long lists the men had argued over at the back of the hall: friendship, freedom, family, love, tolerance, integrity. Wilf said they'd spent three meetings on the spelling of integrity alone.

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You had the brushes because you had steady hands, the one in the family who'd sat through the drawing lessons at the secondary school before the pit took the last shift. You copied the letters onto the star in a serif the old men liked, the kind on gravestones and the Co-op sign. Every word had to sit inside the points, and the points had to look as if they were pushing up through the cloth, lifting at the seams where the paint had flaked. Wilf showed you how to cheat the shading with a grey wash and a darker line where the fold would catch the light.

The pit closed on a Tuesday in March. By summer the lodge had no members left to pay for a banner, and the institute was marked down for the wrecking ball. Wilf died in the autumn, and you were the only one who came to fetch the banner from the cold room behind the bar. The damp had got into it. The letters at the edges had lifted away from the cloth, so INSAN and PROT stopped short where the fold had been. Nobody had asked you to finish them, so you left them as they were and carried it out to the van with the star pointing up at the grey sky.