Black and grey realism tattoo of a vintage twin-lens reflex camera with the word Rolleicord on its top plate, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twin-lens camera on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of a vintage twin-lens reflex camera, with the word Rolleicord lettered across the top plate and two round lenses on the front. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey tones on the metal body and small highlights on the chrome fittings. Faint pale blue and pink reflections appear inside the lenses, and the camera is shown upright and centred on a bare arm against a dark striped sleeve.

Realism Upper arm Camera Lens

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hold it at your waist, never to your eye. That's the trick of it. My father bought a Rolleicord off a bankrupt dentist in Scarborough, and for a year I thought the thing was mocking me, because the picture in the little hooded window came out the wrong way round, gulls flying backwards over the harbour wall.

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The summer I was fourteen the fleet came in short. Eleven boats out of Bridlington, and the men who walked up the quay had faces the colour of wet slate. Dad sent me down with the camera and told me to photograph what was there, not what I wanted. I shot twelve frames. The sixth caught a skipper called Walter Ancliffe kneeling on the stones, cradling a pale blue net float as if it were somebody's head.

When the film came back, the lenses had done something I couldn't explain. Both of them held a small pocket of sky, pink and blue, the sunset behind me folded into the glass. In the sixth frame Walter sat right in the middle of one of those pockets, tiny and upside down. Dad held the strip to the lightbox a long time and said nothing. Then he said you always get one that means something, and that's what the others cost.

Walter's boat came in the following week. He brought the float to our door and asked if we could make him a print to hang in his wheelhouse. I still have the camera. I still hold it at my waist and look down into it, and the world only comes up the right way round once I've stopped trying to look straight at it.