Traditional style tattoo of a tomahawk with a beaded handle and red and brown feathers on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tomahawk and feathers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tomahawk sits at the top with a beaded, banded handle hung with two feathers and fringed tassels. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with shaded edges on the axe head and feathers. Red, yellow, white and black ink create a limited palette, and the design is centred on the limb with partial black shapes and another tattoo cropped at the edges of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Axe Feather Bead Tassel Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hatchet lived in the locker under the tiller of the Mabel Rose, and nobody on the Trent ever asked to borrow it. My uncle Desmond bought it off a scrapyard man in Nottingham in 1961 for cutting through frozen mooring lines, and he kept the blade sharp enough to shave with, which he sometimes did, just to watch the lock-keepers wince.

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The handle was the trouble. Irene, his wife, couldn't abide a bare piece of ash, so one winter she wound it with red and yellow glass beads on waxed thread and bound three bands of brass along its length. She tied two grey feathers she'd begged from a poultry man at Gainsborough market to the top, then hung leather tassels from the bottom so they swung when the boat rocked. Desmond said it looked like a bishop's crook that had got into a fight. Irene said it looked like it had somewhere to be.

When the ice came down in the January of '79, we were stuck above Torksey with the hull groaning like a sick cow. I went over the side with that hatchet and cut us loose from the bollard, one swing at a time, while the beads knocked against my wrist and the feathers stuck to my glove. The boat drifted free. Desmond never once mentioned the scratch I put in the handle, which was how I knew he'd forgiven me.

I sold the Mabel Rose last spring. The new owner, a girl from Hull with a sketchbook and cold hands, found the hatchet in its locker and asked what the feathers were for. I told her they were there so the thing would always look ready to leave.