Two photographs of a black and grey realism full sleeve on an upper arm and forearm, with a winged armoured angel, a skeleton with wings and a skull.

Full sleeve of angels, skeleton and skull in grey

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photographs show a full arm sleeve with a winged, armoured angel near the shoulder, a winged skeleton holding a skull, a seated classical male figure with a chain and anchor, and a woman's face among drifting clouds. The shading is soft and smooth, with strong contrast in the wings and armour, and the design is laid out in vertical panels from shoulder to wrist. Both images show the same arm from different angles against a dark background.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Angel Wing Armour Skeleton Skull Cloud Anchor Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gatekeeper of Veliora had two sons and one ladder, and the ladder was the only thing in the kingdom that reached the clouds. When the bell rang at the mill, the elder son climbed it to ring the answer, because the angels in the high town only listened to a voice from above. He had done it every spring since he was nine. The younger son, Tomas, carried the rope and counted the rungs under his breath, because his brother never counted and always fell at the seventh.

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That spring the seventh rung held. The elder son reached the top, leaned out over the cloud line, and did not come down. Tomas waited until the dusk bell and then went up himself, past the place where the wood was pale and split, and found his brother sitting on the platform with a skull in his lap, talking to it quietly as if it might still be a friend. The skull had belonged to a chained man the high town kept on its roof, a stranger who had once sold them the answers they now pretended they had written themselves.

Tomas took the skull and set it down on the bell frame. He told his brother to come down the ladder backwards, one rung at a time, and to say the numbers out loud. His brother said he could not remember them. So Tomas said them for him, all the way down, into the grey wet air, until the cloud thinned and the mill roof showed beneath them like a coin. Above, the bell rang once more by itself, because a bell rings when it is struck, and no one had struck it.