Realistic knight tattoo in grey shading with a red sash and raised sword, on the back of a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crusader knight with raised sword on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A knight in a great helm with a cross-shaped slit holds an upright sword gripped by a gauntleted hand. The helmet and armour are rendered in smooth grey shading with fine highlights, and a red cloth wraps across the lower part of the design. The design sits against a pale, faded background on the calf, and the tiled floor is visible behind.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pit had been shut three weeks when Nell Haskins found the knight behind the fan house, half sunk in slag and nettles. It was cut from a sheet of boiler plate, taller than her brother, with a helm that had a cross slit into its face and a sword held upright in one riveted fist. Someone had bolted a strip of red cloth across its shoulders, the same faded red as the banner the lodge carried on Gala day.

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Her father had been the fitter at the colliery workshop for thirty years, and she knew his work the way she knew his cough. He filed every rivet flat so a man's glove would not catch on it. The knight's rivets were filed flat. He had made it, she was sure of that, though he had never once mentioned it. Maybe it was for a boy lost in the number four roadway, or maybe for nobody at all. Nobody in the village could say.

The council wanted the scrap for the sale. The men from the yard came on the Thursday with a lorry and a chain, and Nell stood in front of the knight with her arms folded and the red cloth tied around her wrist. They argued until the sun dropped behind the spoil heap. In the end the foreman took off his cap, looked at the flat rivets for a long moment, and told the driver to leave it be.

Nell and two of the lads walked the knight up the chapel steps on a borrowed barrow the next morning and stood it between the oak doors, sword raised toward the pit road, where the men used to walk to their shifts before dawn.

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