Small colour tattoo of a red and blue shield with a white star and paint-like drips, placed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Star shield with drips on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a round shield with red outer rings, a blue centre and a white five-point star, with thin red and blue drips running down from its base. The soft, bleeding edges give it a watercolour-like finish, and the design sits alone on the inner forearm against a plain background of skin, a blue polka-dot fabric and a wooden floor.

Forearm Shield Star Drip Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are fourteen the spring the lodge decides its banner has gone soft at the edges, and Mr Pryce hands you the tin of red and the tin of ultramarine because your hand is steady and your father is underground until six. The banner hangs across the back room of the Miners' Institute, a faded silk that smells of pipe smoke and wet coats.

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Your task is a shield. Not the big one on the gala banner but a small round one for the lodge's pit-head flag, a target with rings of red, a blue middle, and a white star at the centre that Mr Pryce has drawn for you in pencil and told you to mind. You work with a jam jar of water and a brush cut down to three hairs. The paint runs wherever you breathe on it. You let it. Dripping is what happens when you are careless, Mr Pryce says, and then he looks at the streaks you have left below the rim and says nothing, which from him is praise.

The gala comes. The band plays Cwm Rhondda and the lodge men march past the chapel with the flag held high. The wind catches the shield, the wet red bleeds into the white, and somebody's mother says it looks like it was painted in the rain. Your father, who came up from the seam that morning with coal dust in the creases of his eyes, studies it for a long time and then looks at you.

Years later, when the pit is shut and the institute has become a bingo hall, you find the flag folded in a drawer. The drips have dried to tide marks along the bottom. You fold it the way he showed you, star facing in, and leave the rain-coloured edges exactly where they fell.