Mirror selfie of a neo-trad colour sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing a large Dalek with blue lightning and stacked boxes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dalek colour sleeve tattoo

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour sleeve covers the upper arm and forearm, with a detailed Dalek in gold and bronze tones at the centre. Blue lightning, stacked boxes and a green bird-like figure surround it, with shaded, dimensional rendering throughout. The photo is a mirror selfie in which the person's face is hidden by a phone, and a second arm enters from the left edge.

Neo-trad Upper arm Forearm Dalek Lightning Bird Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thing came up Harrow Lane the week after the storm, when lightning had split the ash by Mrs Pollard's gate and left the air smelling of struck metal. Nobody saw it arrive. The children saw it first, a bronze pepperpot on a plunger, its one lamp-eye turning slowly as if hunting for a switch to press.

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Behind it it dragged a stack of wooden crates, each one stencilled with a name nobody in the village could read. A green bird with folded wings sat on top of the stack, and it sang every few minutes in a voice like a rusty gate. The schoolmaster, Edwin Crane, walked out with his hat in his hands and asked it, politely, what its business was. The lamp-eye swung to him and held there. Then it said it was looking for the way back, and the blue lightning crawling across its plates went bright enough to make the dogs bark for a mile.

Mary Tully kept the post office and had no patience for anybody's fright. She came out with a tin cup of tea, set it on the lowest crate and told it to drink, because it had come a long way and so had the tea. The eye stayed on her a long time. The lightning dimmed, one plate at a time, until the only light left was the small green bird's, and the thing stood still in the lane with its arm raised and its cup going cold.

In the morning the crates were gone and the lane was dry. The tin cup sat on Mary's windowsill, rinsed and turned upside down. The bird was perched on Mrs Pollard's gatepost, and when the post van came by it sang out Mary's surname, clear as a bell, and then went quiet.