Realistic tattoo of three slashes with red blood drips and a razor blade reading HELP ME on the forearm.

Razor blade and cuts on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the outer arm showing three dark slashes with red blood drips running down the skin. A grey razor blade with the words HELP ME written on it sits across the lower cuts, with a black shadow beneath it. The shading is smooth and the blood is rendered in red and orange tones against the skin.

Realism Forearm Blood Text

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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 grey blade turned up in the gutter of the fish market on a wet Tuesday, between a crate of gurnard and a boot nobody claimed. Old Mrs Ibbotson, who sold mackerel from a barrow on the quay, picked it up with two fingers and held it to the lamp. Someone had scratched words into the flat of it, and the letters were still plain. HELP ME, it said. She had buried a husband and two sons in that harbour and knew how a message was meant to be read, so she did not put it down.

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She took it to Tam Ferrow at the net loft, because Tam had been the last to come in that week and had not been seen in the Anchor since. He turned it over in his palm for a long while. Then he pulled his coat on and walked up Gull Row without his cap, chalking a little arrow on each lamppost as he went so the others could follow if they needed to. The boarding house at the top had one window lit. He knocked, and when no one answered he sat down on the cold step outside, the way his mother had sat with boats that were overdue, and he said nothing at all.

He was still there when the fleet's lanterns came up the hill at first light, one behind another, the men still in their oilskins. Nobody asked the reason. They sat on the wall in a row and waited with him until the door opened.

The blade hangs now on a nail inside the net loft, the words turned towards the door, so that anyone who walks in can read them and be answered before they have to ask.