Black and grey realism tattoo of a storm with bright lightning bolts through dark clouds, wrapped around the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lightning storm on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo on the upper arm shows a dark storm sky with billowing clouds and bright forked lightning branching down the centre. The shading is soft and smooth, with highlights on the lightning and deep shadows in the clouds, and a dark band at the base suggests a horizon with a faint silhouette of a pole or tree. The image is entirely black and grey, with a plain pale wall behind the arm.

Realism Upper arm Lightning Storm Cloud Horizon Landscape Sky

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

The wind dropped so suddenly that Ruth could hear the ewes complaining in the top barn, and she knew the storm was coming in off the marsh the way her father always said it would: quiet first, then all at once. She stood at the gate with her torch in her coat pocket and counted the fence posts along Carrow Lane, because the telegraph pole at the end of it was the only thing taller than the hedges for a mile.

Keep reading

"Bring the last one in," her father called from the quad bike, his voice thin against the air. "That one's been off her feed since Tuesday." He didn't wait for an answer. He never did when the sky looked like that. The cloud over the flat fields had gone the colour of wet slate, heavy and rolling, and underneath it the light had a greenish edge that made the frost on the stubble look like spilt salt.

The first flash came while she was still in the field. It split the sky above the lane from top to bottom, and for one long breath every hedge, every gate and every wire was lit white. The pole at the end of the lane glowed like a struck match. Then came the crack, so close it seemed to come out of the ground, and the smell of hot iron drifted over the wall. Ruth found the ewe under the blackthorn, flat in the mud, and knelt beside her while the rain came down in sheets and a single lamb slid out, steaming, into the straw.

In the morning the pole was still standing, its top scorched black and its crossbar split like kindling. A crow sat on the nearest wire, looking at it the way people look at something that has surprised them and not yet decided whether to fall. Her father stood beside it with his hands in his pockets. "Stubborn thing," he said, and she was not sure whether he meant the pole.