Colour tattoo of Confederate battle flags showing through torn skin on the upper arm, with red, blue and grey shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Torn skin revealing battle flags on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Three rectangular flag designs in red, blue and white with white stars appear through ripped skin edges. The torn edges are shaded in grey and brown to give a three-dimensional look. The tattoo fills most of the frame on the upper arm, with a grey sleeve and blurred background at the edges.

Upper arm Star Torn skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marion Pask had kept the lost property desk at Carlisle for nineteen years and could usually tell a bag's owner from its contents by smell. The bundle that came in on the Tuesday night service smelled of diesel and damp wool. It had been left in the gents on platform two, folded tight around something that rattled.

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Inside was a flag, or half of one, cut from heavier cloth than anything sold in shops. The red had faded to the colour of weak tea, and the blue corners had been unpicked and then left, the loose threads hanging like hair. Thirteen white stars were stitched on, and four of them had been torn clean out, leaving neat holes in the weave. Along one edge the cloth had been ripped, not cut, as if it had caught on a fence or a door and been pulled through anyway. Inside the hem, in biro capitals, someone had written a surname and a year.

She logged it on the form: one textile, partial, damaged. In the box marked reason for retention she wrote nothing for a long while. Outside, the 6.12 to Newcastle was idling with its doors open, and a porter was shouting at a boy who had climbed onto the luggage rack. Marion thought about how many people would claim a torn thing like that, and how many would only say it wasn't theirs.

Nine days later a woman came to the hatch asking for a bundle that rattled. She did not say what was in it. Marion checked the surname against the hem, watched the woman's face do nothing at all, and handed it across the counter folded exactly as it had arrived.