Realistic black and grey tattoo of two dog tags on a ball chain across a forearm, shown in two side by side photos.

Dog tags and ball chain on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two metal dog tags hanging from a looping ball chain, with the tags angled over the wrist. The shading is smooth and realistic, with soft highlights and cast shadows that give the tags a three-dimensional, metallic look. The image is a diptych of two near-identical photographs of the same forearm against a plain light background.

Realism Forearm Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy came into the shop on Quay Street every Thursday for a month, always after the gas was lit at closing time. She set a blank tin on the counter and asked whether it could be done by morning. Mr Pryce would turn it under the lamp, ask for the name, and strike the letters himself with a set of steel punches, since the engraving machine had seized in April and nobody in Harwick had the part to mend it.

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The first Thursday she gave him her son's name, the blood group, and a regiment number he did not recognise. He asked nothing. The second week she brought a ball chain wrapped in a handkerchief and asked him to thread both tags onto it, the way the army issued them, one long and one short, so they would knock together when a man walked. He fed the chain through the holes with a pair of pliers, his fingers numb from the cold of the back room, while the sea hissed against the harbour wall.

On the third Thursday she set down a second tin and did not say the name. Pryce waited. The tide went out and came back across the sand. At last she said, "Put what the boy would have put," and he understood the boy had never got to decide. He struck the letters in the order of a face he had never seen: a single initial, a date in June, and under it nothing but a small cross.

When she left, the two tags lay on the counter, one bright and one dull, joined by a chain that looped twice before it ended. He wrapped them in the handkerchief and did not put the lamp out until the bell on the pier had rung eleven.