Traditional style forearm tattoo of a grey sword with yellow poppies and green leaves, with a quote set in red lettering down the blade.

Sword and poppies with a quote on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey, shaded sword runs vertically across the forearm with its hilt near the top, flanked by two yellow poppies and sprigs of green leaves. Lines are bold and outlined, with grey shading giving the blade volume. Red and dark lettering in a line-by-line layout is set beside the blade, and the warm yellow flowers contrast with the otherwise grey and green palette.

Traditional Forearm Sword Poppy Flower Leaves Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that rag, lad, and mind the lock gate, because I'll not tell this twice and the water won't wait for anybody. My grandfather hauled coal on the Tarrow Cut, and he swore he saw a smith's forge glowing on the bank at Hobb's Lock at midnight, with no smith in sight.

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The forge belonged to a woman called Maud Sallow, who had mended every broken thing that came off the barges for forty years: kettles, chains, a cracked anchor. One winter a man came down the towpath carrying a sword wrapped in sacking. The blade had snapped a hand's width above the grip, and he said his father had died with it in his hand at the weir. He wanted it made into a bread knife. Maud laid it on her anvil, looked at it a long while, and said no, it would be a blade again or nothing.

She worked a fortnight. Grandad said the sparks came out green and the river went quiet whenever she struck. She fused the old steel to a new core, ground the edge until it sang when you flicked it, and wound the grip in cord the colour of marigolds, because that was what grew wild along the bank. Nobody on the water saw the finished thing, but every bargee knew the lamp was lit.

When the man came back he did not take the sword straight away. He asked what he owed. Maud said the price was that he hang it above his hearth and never draw it again, because a thing mended that well had learned its lesson. He did as she said, and that summer the poppies on the bank grew thicker than anyone could remember. Now, pour that tea before it goes cold.