Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed bullets on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three bullet casings with pointed tips are arranged in a crossed, star-like cluster, shaded with smooth greys and bright highlights to suggest metal. Dark smoky shading and a faint cloud-like background sit behind the bullets, and a larger grey design continues across the upper part of the arm. The image is a close, slightly angled photo of the tattoo on a man's arm, with a bracelet visible on the wrist.

Realism Upper arm Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ammunition locker on the Kestrel Lass had been bolted shut since Freetown, and the chief gunner kept its key on a bootlace round his neck where the whole crew could see him not take it off. Nobody asked me to count the brass. I counted it anyway, because I was the only one aboard who had kept books before the war, and counting was the one thing that kept my hands still on the long nights out past the Western Approaches.

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By the fourth week the swell had gone the colour of wet slate, and the smoke from our single funnel lay flat on the water behind us like something we were dragging. The gun crew had fired at a shadow the night before, a periscope that turned out to be a floating spar, and when they came down from the platform they left three casings on the wet deck. I picked them up. Then I fetched two more from the scuppers and laid all five on the hatch cover in a loose crossed cluster, points out, the way the sun broke through the rain that afternoon.

Mr Harrow found me there at the change of watch. He stood over the brass with his pipe unlit and his face doing the thing it did when he was deciding whether to be angry. Then he said the count was short by one, which was the first true thing anyone had said to me in a week, and he went below without another word.

I left the brass where it lay. Some mornings the swell took a casing over the side, and some mornings I found one rolled against the rail as if it had come back to be counted. I never did find the last shell. But every page I wrote in my logbook after that had a small grey star in the margin where the figures should have been, and I never could make them add up.