Black and grey realism full sleeve on an upper arm and forearm, showing a helicopter, two faces and lightning, with small red accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic sleeve with helicopter and faces

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve covers the upper arm and forearm of a man wearing a grey vest. At the top, a helicopter is rendered in fine greyscale shading, with two large portrait faces and lightning bolts running down the middle of the arm. The lower forearm includes a red cross mark and a mechanical or machine-like detail, with the rest of the piece in greys and black.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Face Portrait Lightning Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The machine came down on the Tarn Ffynnon pad the week the storm took the power lines, and Dilys Pryce was the only one in the valley who could still read its logbook. She sat on an upturned crate in the hangar with a flask going cold beside her and turned the pages slowly, past the service stamps and the fuel figures, until she reached her father's careful capitals in the margin: RED X ON TAIL BOOM. DO NOT REMOVE. NO ONE ASKS WHY.

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The paint had faded to the colour of rust in the years since, but the cross still showed when the low sun caught it. Dilys had grown up believing it marked the airframe for the rescue crews, a sign that it had come back from a bad winter and was not to go up again without a second look. Her father never said otherwise. He only sat at the kitchen table on nights when the lightning walked over the ridge and watched the window the way other men watched the football, counting the seconds between flash and thunder until the count reached nine and he could breathe again.

On the last page, folded into the back cover, she found a pencilled list of names with dates beside them. Eleven of them. Some were crossed through, some had a small tick, and two had nothing at all. Below the list, in a hand she didn't recognise as her father's, someone had written only: the lift at Cwm Du, the wind was wrong, nobody's fault.

She closed the book and walked out onto the pad. The wind had dropped and the cloud was lifting off the far hills. She laid her palm flat against the cross on the tail boom, and the metal was still warm from the afternoon. Then she took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote a twelfth name in the margin, leaving the date blank.