Black and grey realism tattoo of a gas mask with smoky shading across the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gas mask tattoo on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic black and grey tattoo of a gas mask fills the back of a hand, with the filter canister and straps rendered in detailed shading. Smooth gradients and high-contrast highlights give the mask a metallic, three-dimensional look, set against dark smoky clouds. The tattoo is photographed straight on and fills most of the frame, with a second tattooed arm partly visible at the right edge.

Realism Hand Smoke Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The works siren went at ten past two, and by the time I had my boots laced the yard was grey to the rooftops. Bert had left his respirator on the nail behind our back door, the rubber cracked at the seal and the canister still heavy with the last of the tar fumes from the boiler house. I put it on anyway. Nobody else in Calder Hollow was going to walk into that smoke for the Hallam boy.

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The straps pulled my hair. Inside the mask everything tasted of hot metal and my own breath, and the glass fogged so I had to wipe it with my sleeve every few yards. The smoke rolled off the coke heaps in long slow banks, like something being unwound. I kept the stone wall on my left hand and counted the gates. Seven gates to the bottom shed. At the fifth I heard him cough.

Tommy Hallam was sitting against a dye vat with his cap over his face, and when I pulled the mask off to shout at him, the air burned my eyes. He wouldn't stand. So I knelt, got my arm under him, and told him to hold my collar the way his mam held his at the fair. We went out the way I came in, one gate at a time, with the mask over his face and the canister knocking against my ribs.

Nobody gave me a medal. The mask went back on its nail, cracked and smelling of pitch, and I hung it where Bert had hung it. Every winter after, when the smoke came down off the hill and the gulls went quiet, Tommy would stand at our back door and look at it through the glass, as if it might get up and go out again without him.