Traditional style colour tattoo on the upper arm of an orange twenty-sided die with a black insect, green and yellow leaves, a red flower and teal splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twenty-sided die and flower on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A twenty-sided die in orange with a black insect outline on one face sits at the centre of the design, framed by green and yellow leaves. A red flower with a white centre and teal ink splashes sit at the lower edge and behind the die. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills give a traditional look, and the tattoo is photographed against a dark background on the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Dice Insect Leaves Flower Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The calm held the Ellen Parrow for nine days off the Horn, and by the fifth the men had worn out their cards and started wagering shirt buttons. Mattie Crane, who had bought an orange twenty-sided die from a cobbler's widow in Bristol, sat on the hatch with her knees up and rolled it along the planks for anyone who asked. Each face had its numeral picked out in black, and one face bore a beetle with legs drawn like rigging.

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Tom Rudge, the cook's boy, lost his only good shirt to Ned Varley on the fourth night and swore the die was crooked. Mattie laughed and held it out. 'Roll it yourself, and say what you want the wind to do.' Tom wanted a north wind so they could raise the Falklands by Sunday. He rolled. The die clattered past the water cask, skidded over a coil of line, and came to rest with the beetle face up.

Nobody spoke. Mattie picked it up, turned it over in her palm, and said the beetle was the wind's own clerk, who wrote down every promise a sailor made in the dark. 'He's counting now,' she said. 'He'll want what's owed him.' That night Tom crept to the rail and hummed the hymn his mother sang over the washing, and before dawn the canvas filled from the north, cold and hard, just as he had asked.

He never got his shirt back, but Mattie pressed the die into his hand at Valparaíso and told him to keep it. He carried it in his coat for forty years, the beetle face worn smooth by his thumb, and he never once rolled it again.