Black and grey traditional sleeve tattoo on a woman's arm, featuring roses, a female portrait, a banner and a winged skull on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional sleeve with roses, portrait and winged skull

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve runs from the upper arm to the wrist, with a large rose at the shoulder, a female portrait in the middle and a winged skull near the wrist. The linework is bold with solid black outlines, and the shading is in soft greys with some heavier black areas. The arm is held up against a dark car seat, and the tattoo fills most of the right side of the frame.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Rose Portrait Woman Skull Wing Banner Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skipper's tally board says forty-one boxes, and you know before the hatch is even off that the number is a kindness. Gerry Swale wipes his hands on his oilskin and tells you to get below and sleep, but you stay at the rail watching the Humber go from pewter to lead under the trawler's bow, counting gulls the way other men count debts.

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The Kittiwake has carried the same painted rose on her bow since Nell Carrick mixed the red in her back kitchen on Fish Dock. Nell had a portrait face and a mouth that never softened for anybody, and she charged the skippers in pence and in favours. Jack Pell, the bosun before you, had her face inked on his forearm in 1947, with a winged skull beneath it that he swore was the only honest thing on the boat. The skull went over the side with him the winter the ice took the rigging, and nobody on the quay has been able to say the name without looking at the water.

At the fish market a boy from the chandlery holds out a folded paper with a Hull postmark and tells you Nell's niece is selling the shop. You open it on the bollards and read a single line about the rose needing a fresh coat of paint before the spring tides.

You climb back aboard and take the wheel from Gerry without asking. The lamp on the bow catches the red of that rose as you swing her into the river, and for a moment the whole boat glows like something that has been carried a long way home. Gerry laughs and says forty-one, then. You tell him it was always forty-one, and that you have counted the rest.