Black silhouettes of marching soldiers with barbed wire and red and blue ribbon elements on an upper arm tattoo, set against red and grey clouds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Marching soldier silhouettes with barbed wire on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Four black silhouettes of soldiers walk in a line across the middle of the design, with rifles held at their sides. Red and grey clouded shading fills the background behind them, and barbed wire with red and blue ribbon elements frames the top and bottom edges. The bold black fills contrast with the softer shaded background, and the design wraps around the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Silhouette Ribbon Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour was still warm under my palms when the column came up Mill Lane, and I had three trays to get out before the light. My father taught me to hear boots before I looked for them, because on a frost morning the sound carries right down to the ovens. Four pairs of feet, a pause, then four more.

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They walked past the shop window in a line, rifles held low at their sides, and the sky behind them was going the colour of the inside of a peach. I knew the one at the end. Owen Pryce had bought a cob from me every Friday since he was sixteen, and he always asked after his mother's knee. He didn't look in. None of them did. They kept their heads level, as if the bakery were just another house on the road.

I had a tray of loaves still too hot to handle, so I wrapped it in a damp cloth and ran out with it, bare-armed in the cold. The sergeant shook his head, but Owen stepped out of the line, took the top loaf, tore it in two and passed the other half down the row. Nobody said thank you. The bread was enough.

When they had gone I went back in and chalked the day's order on the slate: forty cobs, twelve plaits, one tin loaf for the vicar. Then I wrote Owen's name at the bottom, because I had decided a Friday was a Friday whatever the war did to the roads. Next week I would keep one cob back on the sill and tie a scrap of red ribbon through its handle, so he would know which one was his.