Black and grey tattoo on an upper arm showing three marching soldier silhouettes overlaid with an American flag and a trail of stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three marching soldiers and flag on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three soldier silhouettes in caps march left to right across the arm, each overlaid with a shaded American flag. A trail of outlined and solid stars and sweeping grey swooshes extends behind them toward the back of the arm. The work uses black and grey shading with soft, blended edges and a clean silhouette against the skin.

Upper arm Silhouette American flag Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Auntie Joan stitched the flag from her husband's shirts the winter after the telegram came, and she hung it over the rail of the ferry the morning the three of them left Little Lowe. Stripes from a blue work shirt, stripes from a checked one, a white square cut from a bedsheet that never quite lay flat.

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Tom Harker went first, then the Pascoe boys, all three in caps their mothers had brushed for the occasion. We stood on the slipway and counted them off the way a sergeant would, though none of us had ever been near a sergeant. My job was the stars. I had cut thirty-one from tin foil and pinned them to the back of Tom's coat so they would trail behind him when the wind came round off the water.

The wind never came round. The stars stayed put on the coat and the flag stayed folded in Joan's arms, and the three men walked up the hill toward the bus shelter as if the whole island were watching, which it was. At the top Tom turned, the way you do, and the foil caught the low sun and threw it across the harbour in one long bright smear.

Joan still has the flag. She unfolds it on Sundays and says the stars were the only part that ever flew properly.