Realism-style black and grey tattoo of two dog tags on a chain across a forearm, with lettering stamped on the tags.

Dog tags with chain on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic tattoo of two military-style dog tags and a beaded chain, with a ring-shaped tag loop visible at the top, wrapped across the forearm. The tags are shaded in soft greys and blacks to suggest metal and depth, and the stamped lettering on each tag is partly legible. The composition sits diagonally across the arm, with the chain trailing off the left edge of the frame.

Realism Forearm Chain Lettering Metal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Pritchard found the tags in February, when the thaw had softened the top field and the plough brought up more flint than soil. The chain had rusted into one grey knot. She worked it loose with her thumbnail at the kitchen table while the kettle ticked on the range, and the two oval plates slid out onto the oilcloth. The larger one bore the ghosts of stamped capitals. The smaller one still read AND MY, and below that a word that might have been CLOSEST, or possibly CRISPEST.

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Her father would have known the regiment from the shape alone. He had kept a biscuit tin of such things from his own national service, along with a letter he never let anyone read. Mags set the plates on the windowsill where the low sun could reach them and went out to see to the ewes, thinking about the soldier who had lost them. The field had been a training ground once, then a hayfield, then nothing much, and somebody had walked across it and never come back for his name.

By dusk she had the words half-guessed. She wrote them on the back of a feed invoice in pencil: IN YOU, I'VE FOUND THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. Then she changed the last line to CLOSEST FRIEND, because that was what the metal seemed to want, and pressed so hard the pencil tore the paper.

In the morning she hung the chain on the five-bar gate at the bottom of the lane, where the post van passed and the walkers cut through on the footpath. The wind caught the plates and knocked them softly together, again and again, like someone knocking to be let in.