Black and grey realism tattoo of plate armour across a shoulder and upper arm, with an eagle emblem on the arm and a helmeted figure on the shoulder plate.

Plate armour shoulder and arm tattoo

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows segmented plate armour covering the shoulder and upper arm, with rivets, straps and bevelled edges rendered in fine shading. An eagle emblem sits on the upper arm plate, and a helmeted figure with scroll lettering is on the shoulder plate. The work is entirely black and grey, with strong highlights and deep shadows that give the metal a three-dimensional look.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Armour Eagle Helmet Warrior Scroll Lettering

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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 crate arrives at the Lendrum crossing on a Tuesday, wedged between a pallet of sheep dip and a case of bicycle parts, and nobody on the shift wants to sign for it. You are the one who opens it, with the stiff knife you keep for seals. Inside, wrapped in a tarpaulin gone hard with oil, are two shoulder plates and a run of hinged lames, blackened the way old iron goes when nobody has handled it for years.

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The manifest says reclamation, antiques, no value declared. The eagle on the upper plate has one wing folded and the other spread, and someone has rubbed its rivets bright with a thumb. On the larger plate a helmeted man looks out over a scroll, and the lettering runs round the edge in a hand that has worn most of the letters away. You can make out a word that might be thar and another that might be on, and you spend your break trying to build a sentence from them.

Your supervisor, Ruth Kettering, says the crate came off a lorry turned back at the Dover side, which tells you nothing and everything. Shift ends at six. At quarter to six a driver with a smoker's cough leans through the hatch and asks whether the crate is his. You tell him no. You tell him it belongs to whoever can still lift it.

You carry it out to the car park yourself, both plates held against your hip, and the wind off the flats goes straight through the rivets. Nobody has ever paid you to be a knight. Still, when you set the plates on the bonnet, the eagle catches the sodium light and seems to lift its folded wing, and you stand there in your hi-vis until the sensor lamp clicks off.