Black and grey shield crest tattoo on the inner forearm, showing animal figures and an open book in fine linework with soft shading.

Shield crest tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shield-shaped crest with a curled scroll border sits on the inner forearm. Its four panels contain animal figures, including a badger and a lion, along with a book and a serpent-like shape. The outlines are fine and the panels are shaded in grey, with a plain light background and a dark sleeve at the right edge of the frame.

Forearm Crest Shield Lion Book Serpent Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trunk came off the back of Mr Oakes's lorry the week the Michaelmas fair pitched on the common at Haddley. Under a moth-eaten blanket lay a bundle of old school banners Dad had bought for a shilling at a clearance sale. Each one was cut in the same shield shape, with a curled scroll along the top. On one, a badger sat in the bottom left quarter, a lion reared in the top left, a green serpent wound around a book in the middle, and the whole thing had been stitched by someone who loved fine lines more than they loved sleep. Nobody on the fairground knew what it meant, and I liked that they didn't.

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Dad told the story each night in the Dodgems tent while he oiled the hinges. A boy called Ambrose Quill had been sorted into the badger house, which everyone agreed was sensible for a lad who could never sit still in a chair. The serpent house had taken the clever ones, and the book stood for the library they all wanted and none of them were allowed into after dark. Dad said the banners were older than the common itself and that they only ever hung together when the wind was right.

Vesper Crane, who ran the rifle gallery and resented every penny the other stalls took, climbed into our van on the last night and walked off with the serpent panel. He told the constable it was his. I went after him at dawn with a torch, found the panel nailed to the back of his caravan, and took it back with a claw hammer and no apology.

When the rain came through the big top that week, I sat on an upturned crate and stitched the scroll back on, the lion's paw sewn tight to the badger's side. When the wind got under the flap, all four quarters lifted together, as if they had never been separate at all.