Colour tattoo sleeve on an upper arm and shoulder showing Pokémon-style creatures, a white bird, snowflakes and flowers, shown in three side-by-side views.

Pokémon characters sleeve on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The sleeve shows a Charmander-like lizard, a Bulbasaur-like creature, a Cubone-like character in a skull helmet, a white bird and a serpent-like creature among pink and purple flowers. The linework is soft and the shading is smooth and painterly, with glowing highlights on the snowflakes and sunset sky. The composition fills the upper arm and shoulder with a bright, multicoloured scene shown from three angles.

Upper arm Shoulder Pokemon Bird Snowflake Flower Sky Serpent Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are fourteen the summer the ice bird comes down over the valley and snow falls in six-pointed stars onto the barley. Your mother sends you up the terraces with a skin of goat milk and a warning not to look at the sky for too long, because the old men say it will take your eyes the way it took the frost.

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Halfway up you find the lizard, sitting on a warm flat stone with a flame at the end of its tail that gutters like a candle in a draught. Its eyes are wet, though it may only be the smoke. You offer it the milk. It licks the lip of the skin, then grins, showing teeth like a row of barley grains, and sets its flame so bright that the snow on the nearest rock hisses into water.

Beyond them, in the reeds at the river's edge, a child in a bone helmet sits with its knees drawn up, humming to something it holds against its chest. The helmet is the skull of a great beast that died before anyone's grandmother was born, and the child wears it the way you would wear a grief you had not finished carrying. When you crouch beside it, the child does not look up. It only points with one small hand at the long pale serpent coiling through the shallows, and at the seed-backed creature asleep under the lilies, its green roof of leaves rising and falling.

When the ice bird folds its wings and the sun sinks red behind the peaks, you fill the skin from the river. By the time you reach the terraces the lizard has gone ahead of you, and the snowflakes on the cloth of your tunic have not melted. Your mother asks what you saw. You tell her three creatures and a bird, and she laughs and says that is how every valley story begins.