Colour traditional tattoo on an upper arm showing a red and black emblem with red triangles, dark swirling shapes with red eyes, and a grey medallion with green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black emblem with leaves on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large circular emblem in black and red sits at the centre, with red triangles arranged inside a grey dotted disc. Dark, feathered shapes with red eyes wrap around the outside, and a grey medallion containing a creature silhouette sits at the lower left among green leaves. Bold black outlines and solid red and green fills give it a bold, graphic look, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a blurred indoor background.

Traditional Neo-trad Upper arm Emblem Triangle Eye Creature Medallion Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pargeter had locked the cellar door twice before supper, and still the sound came up through the boards: a dry, patient scraping, like someone turning pages with a fingernail. Edie set the tureen on the sideboard and listened. The lodgers at the long table had stopped talking. Mr Haddow, who had taken the attic room in April and paid three months in advance, was watching the window where the sea had gone the colour of wet slate.

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"Gulls," said Edie, though there were no gulls.

She went down with the lamp anyway. The cellar smelled of paraffin and salt. Along the back wall someone had nailed a sheet of tin and painted on it a wheel of red and black, three red triangles set inside a grey disc of dots, like rain falling on a dark sky. Around its rim hung a ring of eyes, some open, some half shut, each one red at the corners and wet. The scraping was them blinking against the metal.

On the shelf beneath, between a jar of nails and a fern gone yellow in its pot, sat a pewter medallion no bigger than a crown. Its creature was a silhouette, all crest and tail, curled above a ring of green leaves scratched into the metal. Edie knew the shape. Her father had carried one just like it in his waistcoat pocket the summer the herring boats came in empty, and he had never once said where it came from.

She lifted the medallion and the eyes all turned, slow as tides, towards the lamp. Upstairs a door opened and closed. In the morning Mr Haddow's room was empty, the bed made tight, and on the pillow lay a single green leaf, its edge pressed sharp against the linen. Edie pocketed the coin and did not tell Mrs Pargeter.