Solid black bison silhouette with the word Roam in white script across its body, a blackwork tattoo on the inner upper arm.

Roam bison silhouette on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black bison silhouette fills most of the frame, with the word Roam set across its body in white flowing script that shows the skin through the ink. The bison's legs, horn and shoulder outline are simplified into clean, unshaded black shapes. The photograph is black and grey against a dark background, with the upper arm filling the frame.

Blackwork Lettering Upper arm Script Silhouette Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The function room above the Crown smells of floor polish and warm lager, and the buffet has been picked over down to its cocktail sticks by the time you get there. Dawn Pettigrew, who sat behind you in Geography and once drew a bison on the cover of your planner, finds you by the crisps. "Still going on about America, then?" she says, and you laugh, because you did say that at sixteen, with the confidence of someone who had only ever seen the Rockies on a calendar.

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Nobody here knows what happened to the plan. Dawn has three kids in a semi on Eastgate, and Marcus, who was going to be a vet, runs a plumbing van and sends you messages about a Vauxhall he is restoring. You tell them about the grain elevators in Nebraska, the lorry you drove from Calgary to Halifax, the winter you slept in a hostel in Lisbon beside a chess set missing a bishop. Each place is a stop on a map you never bothered to fold. They nod the way people nod at weather in other counties.

Near the end, Mr Hollis, the old Geography teacher with his cardigan buttoned wrong, comes over with a glass of orange squash. He doesn't remember your name at first, then does, and asks whether you ever got to see a real herd. You say yes, on a flat stretch outside a town whose name you have forgotten, the animals so close their breath smoked in the cold and the whole ground seemed to move at once, slow and heavy, going somewhere nobody had told them.

When the DJ plays the song from the school disco, you stand at the back with Dawn, and she squeezes your arm and says you look exactly the same. You don't correct her. Outside, the car park is wet, and you pull your sleeve down as you walk, the way you always do, as if the word might slip off and run away down the hill toward the river.