Colour traditional-style tattoo on a calf showing a green cloaked figure holding a gold blade above red flames and a yellow and teal wing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green cloaked figure with gold blade on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a green hooded or cloaked figure holding a long gold-hilted blade diagonally across the top of the design. Red flame shapes rise beneath the figure, above a yellow and teal wing or feathered form at the base. Bold dark outlines and flat fills in green, red, yellow and teal give it a classic colour look, set against a plain skin background with black plastic sheeting behind the leg.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the grate, the wind off the harbour gets into old bones. My grandmother had this from her own grandmother, and she swore it was true because the blade hung in Pellow's chandlery window when she was a girl. A cloaked man came down to Morvath in the year the herring failed, his green cloak wet through, a gold-hilted sword laid across his shoulders like a yoke. Nobody asked his name. He asked only for the loan of a furnace.

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The smith's wife gave him her husband's bellows and the back shed, and for nine nights sparks came up through the slate roof and the gulls wouldn't settle on it. On the tenth morning the cloaked man walked out onto the mole carrying the blade, and under his other arm, wrapped in sailcloth, a bird as big as a child, its wing tips already scorched red from the fire. He laid it on the wet stones. The gulls went quiet.

He cut the wing clean through, and the bird did not cry out. It folded itself up like a letter and went off over the water with one wing working and the other lying on the stones, and where it had burned the sea smoked for a week. The cloaked man picked up the wing, pulled a single teal feather from it, and gave the feather to the smith's wife. Keep it, he told her, until someone in Morvath is brave enough to ask for a thing they cannot afford.

I have kept that feather in the tin on my dresser for forty years, and nobody has asked me for anything yet. Mind the gate on your way out.

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