Colour tattoo of a red, white and blue flag with white stars showing through torn skin on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Torn skin flag tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo shows a red, white and blue flag with white stars, framed by ragged, torn-skin edges in a claw-mark arrangement. The linework is bold and black-outlined, with shaded edges that give the flag panels some depth. The design sits centrally on a fleshy upper arm against a maroon shirt, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Upper arm Flag Star Torn skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gale had torn the mainsail clean across by the time we raised the Lizard, and Dad swore it was a gull that did it, though no gull I have ever met could hang on to canvas that long. Ruth sat up with it in the fish house, the lamp hung from a hook, the kettle boiling dry twice while she worked. Four long rents ran down the cloth as if something had raked it with its hands, and she pulled each edge tight with a palm thimble and waxed thread until the seams stood up like ridges on a drum.

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"Looks like a cat's been at it," I said, holding the lamp steady so she could see her needle. She didn't look up. "Cats don't stitch," she said. Along the torn strips she had cut five-pointed stars from an old oilskin coat, the yellow gone soft as butter, and she was fixing each one with a seaman's hitch so the salt wouldn't loosen it. Dad had bought that coat off a drowned man's widow in Newlyn, and he never once wore it himself.

We took the boat out on the Thursday with the sail repaired and the wind coming round from the south-west, soft enough to let the old canvas breathe. The rents showed as dark lines where the stitches pulled, and the stars caught the early light and flashed like something signalling from the far side of the bay. Dad stood at the tiller with his jaw set, saying nothing, and I thought he was angry until I saw him reach up and touch one of the stars as we passed under it.

We came home at dusk. The sail hung loose on its boom, and from the quay you could see the four torn places open to the sky, blue behind the red, as if the cloth had always been two colours underneath and the gale had only shown us which one was holding.