Traditional colour sleeve tattoo covering the upper arm and forearm, with an eagle, crown, sunrise and rose above a banner reading MOM.

Traditional colour arm sleeve with eagle and rose

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve of bold traditional tattoos runs from the upper arm to the wrist, shown on a man wearing a grey t-shirt outdoors. The design includes an eagle wing, a crown, a rising sun, clouds, a rose and a ribbon banner, all outlined in black with solid fills. Bright reds, yellows, blues and greens dominate the composition.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Eagle Wing Crown Rose Banner Ribbon Cloud Dagger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun was already clearing the harbour wall when Ada Pryce pulled the last sheet from her father's flash drawer, the one with the warped brass runner that stuck on the third notch. Gulls walked the slipway as if they owned it. She laid the drawing on the counter and weighted its corners with a tin of Indian ink and a bent teaspoon.

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Her father had drawn the eagle first, a wing spread wide enough to cover the whole sheet, and the crown sat above it as though it had been dropped there, gold paint flaking at the rim. The rose was something he had made for her mother, fat-petalled and red as a pillar box. Below it a ribbon banner curled round the point of a dagger, and the empty scroll waited for a name. Ada had coloured the clouds herself, blue wash laid thin over yellow, so the sky looked like it was thinking about rain.

Tom Ferris came in at seven with his sleeve already rolled and asked, almost shyly, for the sun to go on last. It was the first thing he wanted to see when he woke up, he said, and the last thing he wanted before the bell. She told him that her father always did the sun last, because everything else had to be standing there for it to rise over.

She worked until the light came through the blind in bars and the kettle went cold twice. When she had finished she wiped the banner clean and wrote the name in the copperplate her father had taught her, then sat back to let the ink dry on the page. Out on the water a boat was coming in low with its sails furled, and she watched it all the way to the wall.