Black ink illustration of a woman with a hair bun and tattoos of a swallow, skull and Darth Vader helmet on her upper arm, traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed woman with blaster illustration

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black ink illustration shows a woman with a hair bun, a tear on her cheek and a blaster held beside her head, with a wisp of smoke rising from the barrel. Her upper arm and shoulder are covered in traditional-style tattoos, including a swallow, a skull, a Darth Vader helmet, a heart, a key, a lightning bolt and a fern. The image uses solid black shapes and fine hatching on a plain pale background with no colour.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Hair bun Smoke Swallow Skull Heart Key Lightning bolt Fern Star Dagger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit in close, the rain's coming sideways off the river and I'll not shout over it. You know the stalls on Tanner Street, the ones under the blue tarpaulin where the fish hall used to be. Nell Harrow kept the one at the end. Keys cut while you wait, two pounds, and she never once asked what the key was for.

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That winter the market was full of men who owed money to a man called the Visor. He wore a dented black helmet with a grille for a mouth, and he paid nobody in coins. He paid in fear. Sol, Nell's little brother, had borrowed against a van that wasn't his, and the Visor's men came every Thursday to stand under the awning and breathe through that grille until the whole market went quiet.

Nell kept an old pistol wrapped in oilcloth beneath the biscuit tin, its barrel scorched from some war nobody on Tanner Street would talk about. On the Thursday she unwrapped it, lit a cigarette off the stove, and stepped out into the rain with the thing held level beside her cheek. Smoke curled from the barrel, though she had not fired a shot. She'd only wanted the Visor to see it.

He laughed through his helmet. Then he saw what she had in her other hand: a brass key, freshly filed, the same shape as the padlock on his strongbox, the one he'd lost in the gutter the night before. Nell had found it, and she'd cut a copy for herself just to make the point. "Every lock has a key," she said. "Yours is in my tin. Go home."

He went. The rain eased. Above the stalls a swallow came down out of the grey and perched on the awning rail, twitching its tail as if it had only just noticed the weather.