Black and grey full arm sleeve tattoo of a diver in a vintage helmet, a skull and boxy machinery, shown from three angles across the upper arm, forearm and hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Diver, skull and machinery full arm sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The sleeve shows a diver in an old-style helmet and weighted suit on the upper arm, with a large skull wreathed in smoke at the top and a skull among rubble on the hand. Down the forearm, boxy machine panels with dials and screens run in a column, drawn with heavy outlines and soft grey shading on the diver's torso and the metal. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, and the three photographs show the same arm from the front, side and close-up angles.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Hand Helmet Skull Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water in the undercroft of Harrowby Castle is the colour of stewed tea, so I work by feel most of the afternoon, one glove on the cold iron rail and the other on the row of dials somebody bolted to the wall before the war. Maud, you would laugh at the state of me. I have silt in my teeth and a cut on my wrist from a grate that didn't want to be moved.

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Behind the grille there's a column of metal boxes stacked one above another, each with a glass face gone milky with age. The pump men called it the stack. Every box has a little bakelite handle, and I turned them all in order, top to bottom, the way the card on the wall tells you to. The third screen flickered and gave me one green line, steady as a pulse, which I did not expect from anything that has been under this much water for this long.

Under the fallen ceiling there's a skull, a horse's I think, with a cloud of silt lifting off it whenever my fin touches the stones. Dad would have called it a bad omen and walked out. I called it the stopper, because when I pulled the big lever the whole grate rose and the cellar began to drain with a sound like someone clearing their throat.

By dusk the water had dropped a hand's width and the steps came up slick and grey, and on the top one somebody had left a lamp, still warm to the touch. I haven't decided whether to tell the Trust. Come up in June and I'll show you the screen. The line is still there, and I've started to think it is counting something.