Black and grey realism full sleeve tattoo on an arm, showing an angel with a spear, a woman's portrait, a skeleton and a chained figure.

Full sleeve of angels and a woman's portrait

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Four photographs show a full sleeve tattoo from different angles, with an angel holding a spear over a serpent, a realistic portrait of a woman with wind-swept hair, a skeleton beside a winged figure, and a seated man in chains. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey clouds and smoke filling the background between the figures. Only black and grey ink is used, and the sleeve wraps from the upper arm down to the wrist.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Angel Skeleton Wing Chain Serpent Spear Cloud Smoke Winged figure Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harrow had counted the cages of the Ashgrove winding gear every morning since the explosion, and every morning there were fewer men coming up the steel. Smoke hung over the pit head like a lid. Her mother had stopped setting a place for her father on the Tuesday, and nobody in Colliers Row said his name aloud anymore, as though it might bring the roof down again.

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The chapel man came with a sketchbook. He was called Thomas Vane, a painter from Leeds who had walked up from the station with a portfolio under his arm and a shilling for every drawing. He wanted the miners' wives. He wanted the angel carved above the chapel door, the one with the spear, standing on a serpent that coiled through painted clouds. Nell sat for him on the chapel step, and while he drew her face he talked about the old engraving of the chained man left on a rock for the birds, who had stolen fire and paid for it.

"Men go down for the light," he said, "and the mountain keeps the chain."

She did not want a lesson. She wanted to know whether the cage would come up with her father in it. Vane put down his pencil and looked at the smoke coming off the headgear. "I can draw what you want kept," he said. "I cannot draw what comes back."

On the Friday the cage rattled up with a single lamp swinging in it. Nell watched the lamp, not the man beneath it, until it was close enough to see the soot on his chin. He was alive, and he was grinning, and the smoke above the shaft finally thinned into grey ribbons that curled away over the hills like the clouds in Vane's sketch.