Traditional style tattoos of roses, a skull and a woman's head cover both forearms, shown in full colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional forearm sleeves with roses and figures

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are covered in traditional style tattoos, including a woman's head near the elbow, red roses, a patterned skull, a bird and a snake. Bold black outlines are filled with solid colour in reds, greens, yellows and blues. The designs wrap around both arms, with a cream jumper sleeve and a white cushion visible behind.

Traditional Forearm Woman Rose Skull Bird Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grass snake had gone stiff in the hay bales sometime in the night, and I found it when I went to shake out the bedding for the heifers, coiled as tight as a rusted spring and no more alive than a dropped length of rope. Grandad Ray saw me standing there with my hand over my mouth and told me to fetch the zinc bucket and the old tea towel with the faded roses on it, the one nobody used for drying anything.

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We carried it up to the kitchen between us, the bucket balanced on the warm rail of the range while the kettle ticked and frost furred the inside of the window. Ray swore the snake had a bit of life left in it, same as the swallow that had been living in the cattle shed since Michaelmas. It had missed the leaving, he said, the way some people miss the last bus, and it had been flying the rafters in circles ever since, dropping muck on the feed sacks and looking put out about it.

Then the snake lifted its head over the rim, slow as a question, and the swallow dropped off the beam and landed on the sill. For a while neither of them moved, and I thought about how often Ray had told me that nothing on a farm stays unless it has decided to stay.

By dusk the snake was gone from the bucket, sliding across the flagstones toward the scullery, and Ray opened the back door onto the yard. The swallow went out over the snow, low along the hedge, past the withered hips on the rose bush, and was gone before I could say goodbye to it.