Three side-by-side photos of an upper arm: a blue and grey tattoo of a club crest with wings and stars, fading in the middle panel and gone in the last.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Football club crest tattoo on upper arm, three panels

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Three side-by-side photographs of an upper arm show a tattoo of a football club crest, with a shield, wings, a banner below and three stars above. In the first panel the linework is clear and the ink is blue and grey with light shading, the second panel shows the ink noticeably paler, and the third shows plain skin with no visible ink. A hand rests on the shoulder and a blue sports top sits at the edge of each frame.

Upper arm Shield Wing Star Banner Crest

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had copied the crest from a tea towel because the club's own artwork was locked in a drawer at the boardroom, and the chairman wanted it on the coach before the Saturday run to Carlisle. She mixed the blue on a paint tray balanced across the bonnet while Terry from the depot held the ladder and insisted the wings were wrong.

Keep reading

"They're not wrong, they're just old," she said. The shield had to be exact, the three stars placed by eye, and the banner underneath lettered in a hand she had practised on the back of a bus ticket. By four o'clock the rain had started, fine and sideways, and the blue bled a little at the edges of the wings. She decided it suited them.

The coach went to Carlisle and came back with the crest intact, though the banner had smudged into something that might have been a motto or a shopping list. Over the winter the sun got at it through the depot's open doors, and the blue faded to the colour of a cloudy swimming pool. Ruth repainted it twice more before spring, then stopped, because the chairman sold the coach to a school in Wigan and nobody thought to ask her back.

Last month she drove past the school on her way to a job and saw the coach parked by the gates, its side scrubbed clean as a slate. Only when the low sun came in from the east could she make out the three stars, faint as thumbprints on glass.