Black winged triforce crest tattoo on a calf, with red, blue, green and yellow watercolour washes behind it.

Triforce crest with watercolour splashes on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

The design is a solid black winged crest with a triforce of three triangles at its centre. The black areas are filled with clean, sharp edges, while the colour sits behind them as loose, bleeding washes of red at the top, blue on the left, and green and yellow on the right. The emblem is centred on the leg in a close crop against a dark background.

Calf Crest Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hallam had fed the Morag Rose's crew for eleven years, and the crest on the galley bulkhead had been there longer than he had. Someone had scratched it into the paint with a nail: a pair of black wings spread either side of three stacked triangles. Each morning before the kettles went on he wiped it with the same grey rag, and each morning the rag came away streaked with whatever had seeped out of the pots lashed under the sink.

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The paint had been bought cheap in Lerwick, and it bled when the air turned damp. Red rose up from the top of the bulkhead where the urn steamed, blue crept along the left wall where the cold came through the hull, and green and yellow pooled near the hatch where the afternoon light fell. The mate called it a disgrace. Hallam called it weather, and he liked it better than the flat grey the boat had been painted in.

The night they rounded Sumburgh Head, the sea came over the bow hard enough to fling the pots from their hooks. Lids split, colour ran across the deck planks, and the galley smelt of turpentine and burnt porridge. When Hallam crawled in with a bucket, the lowest triangle was full of wet yellow, bright as a yolk, and the one above it had folded into a lake of blue. He sat on the floor with his back to the stove and laughed until the mate shouted down to ask if he'd gone soft.

In the morning he left the bulkhead alone. The crew came in for tea and stood looking at it, and for once nobody suggested a scrub. The triangles stayed the way the sea had left them, sharp at their edges and running at the bottom, and Hallam stopped wiping them down.