Rear view of a shirtless man in black underwear with dark ornamental tattoos on his upper arm and shoulder, standing beside a steel cooker.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Man with arm tattoos in a kitchen

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A man is photographed from behind, standing in a kitchen wearing black underwear with a visible waistband. Dark ornamental tattoos cover his upper arm and shoulder, with further dark marks visible on the arm near the elbow. The image is largely grey and muted in tone, with a steel range, wooden cabinets and a kettle filling the background.

Upper arm Shoulder Man Tattoo Arm tattoo Ornamental

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 gate was due on Friday, and by Thursday night I still had the left-hand scroll sitting cold on the anvil, a curl of rod that refused to close. Mrs Ashdown had brought her husband's drawings down from the lodge in a biscuit tin, soft at the corners from handling, and I laid them out under the lamp beside the forge. Every sheet showed the same thing: bindweed climbing a spiral, leaves turned over to show their silver undersides, and one tendril always reaching half an inch past where it ought to stop.

Keep reading

I asked her why the tendril overshot. She said Arthur had drawn it that way on purpose, that he told her the vine was looking for the way out. I said iron doesn't look for anything. She laughed and said that was why he'd wanted me, because I was the only smith in Attercliffe who would argue with a dead man's sketch instead of simply copying it.

So I stopped arguing and started heating. I brought the bar to a white heat, let it fall into the spiral, and gave the tendril its extra half inch. The metal took it with a sigh I felt in my back teeth. By two in the morning the gate lay flat on the bench, every leaf catching the forge light, dark grey where the hammer had burnished it and blue where the heat had run.

Mrs Ashdown came down at dawn in her coat and ran one finger along the tendril. It stopped just short of the gatepost, where a small brass latch waited. 'There,' she said, and that was all. The bindweed had found its way out, and I hung the gate that afternoon without once thinking to ask where out was.