Black ink tattoo of a sheriff's hat with an orange star badge, a crossbow and a sword on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sheriff hat, crossbow and sword on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three separate black motifs sit down the forearm: a wide-brimmed sheriff's hat with an orange star badge at its centre, a crossbow in profile, and a long curved sword blade angled towards the wrist. The shapes are filled with solid black ink with a few fine linework details on the crossbow, and the star is the only area of colour. The motifs are spaced evenly against plain skin with no background, and the photograph is taken straight on at close range.

Forearm Sword Hat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hat had hung on the nail by the church hall door since the spring the bells stopped. Nobody in Hollin Ferry would touch it, because the last man who wore it had walked out to the flooded quarry and not come back. Nell took it down on a wet Tuesday, when the gate chain rattled and the lamps along the lane had gone out one by one.

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She counted what she had: eleven bolts in a cracked case, a crossbow with a stiff left stirrup, and the long blade her grandfather brought home from a war nobody in the village talked about. Bolts were quiet, which mattered. A shot carried across the water and brought the dead drifting up the lane like smoke. So she sat on the low wall with the crossbow across her knees and waited for the dark to thin out the noise.

Ted Pascoe came up the lane at first light with a bicycle wheel in one hand and a dog on a rope, looking for someone to tell him what to do. He was twelve and stubborn, and he looked at the hat the way she had once looked at her father's boots. She set it on his head. It came down over his ears. "You keep the gate," she said. "Shoot only what's close enough to see the whites."

When she walked off towards the quarry road, the blade on her back and the bolts rattling in her pocket, she heard him behind her, calling out the names of everything he could see, the way the old sheriff used to. She did not turn round. The gate chain went taut, and then, she thought, came a small careful click, the sound of a boy testing the latch.