Solid black stencil-style design of two figures in silhouette, filled with an American flag pattern of stripes and stars, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stars and stripes figures silhouette

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two standing figures in solid black silhouette, with a rifle-like shape extending from the left figure. The figures are filled with a waving American flag, with white stripes running across them and white stars clustered at the top of the heads. The image is a high-contrast black and white drawing with no shading, set against a plain white background.

Blackwork Flag Silhouette Star Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flag was still damp from the wash when Mae came out with the pins in her mouth. Wind off the lake kept lifting its corner, so she stood on the second step and let it snap against her shins while she worked the hem straight. Her boys had cut it from their father's bunting, the red stripes gone pink from forty summers of sun, and they had stitched the stars on with thread from the drawer where the buttons lived.

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Hollis, the elder, had come home in March with a limp he refused to discuss and a rifle he had not been allowed to keep. He leaned it against the shed now, muzzle down, the way the sergeant had taught him, and he watched his brother Dell climb the ladder with the rope between his teeth. Dell was the one who had wanted the flag bigger. Dell said a small flag looked like an apology.

They had argued about the figures too. Hollis wanted them standing apart, the way men stood in a photograph. Dell wanted them close enough that the stripes ran from one shoulder into the other, so nobody could tell where one of them ended and the cloth began. Mae had sided with Dell, which surprised them both, and then she had sat up with a torch and a thimble making the seams meet at the collars.

When the rope was fast, Dell came down and handed his brother the far end. They pulled together and the flag rose hand over hand until the stars sat level with the gutter. Hollis tied off on the cleat, looked up at the two shapes, and said nothing. Mae took the pins from her mouth and said that it would do, then went inside to put the kettle on before the wind changed.