Traditional style tattoo of a black and grey knight helmet with red and orange feather plumes on the upper arm, with part of another coloured tattoo visible at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knight helmet with red plumes on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bold knight's helmet in profile, shaded in black and grey with white highlights, sits beneath a fan of red and orange feather plumes. The heavy black outlines, scaled gorget at the base and flat colour fills are typical of traditional American tattooing. Part of a separate coloured design, possibly a bird, appears at the top left against a dark background.

Traditional Upper arm Armour Plume Feather Bird

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

You learn the tilt on the Michaelmas fair at Boston, where the ground stays soft from the rain and the lamps come on before four. Dessie Crane, who runs the booth, hands you a lance with a split end and tells you a champion never looks at the barrel, only at the helmet on the post. The helmet is dented tin painted to look like steel, with a fan of red and orange plumes wired to its crest. Three seasons running, nobody knocks it off.

Keep reading

Then a lad from the cattle pens pays his tuppence and rides at it like he is angry with his mother. The lance skids off the brim and the plumes shiver. He tries again, and again, and by the fourth pass the crowd has stopped shouting and started counting. You stand at the rail with the spare lance across your knees, chewing a sugared almond, and you think about what the helmet is really for: nothing much, a bit of tin on a stick, a thing that outlasts the fair.

On the last night the wind turns and the canvas snaps. Dessie says pack it up, but you hear the lad's boots coming back across the wet grass. He takes the lance from the rack, sets his feet the way Dessie showed you, and leans into it without once looking at the barrel. The helmet spins off the post and tumbles into the mud, plumes lying flat as wet bracken. You pick it up and hand it to him. He grins, tucks it under his arm, and walks off towards the lorries without looking back.