Black and grey Viking chest and arm sleeves, with two longships and tattooed portraits in the sails above a large Thor's hammer on the stomach.

Viking ships and Thor's hammer chest piece

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A torso with extensive tattoos covers the chest, shoulders and both arms. Two Viking longships sail on rough water beneath clouds and ravens, with portrait faces inside their sails, and a Polish script line sits between them. A large Thor's hammer with knotwork and interlaced patterns sits on the stomach, with shading and detail across the rest of the design.

Realism Chest Upper arm Forearm Raven Portrait Knotwork Horse Sea Cloud Lettering Warrior Sleeve

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mast had split in the autumn gale, and Sigrun spent three days lashing a new one from ash while her brother Oddi argued with the carpenter over the price of pitch. Nobody in Hafnar believed the old boat would take the western crossing again, least of all the men who had painted its sail. Those faces were still there, stiff and staring from the cloth, the same faces that had grinned at the harbour wall every morning since midsummer.

Keep reading

Across the mole, the second longship waited with its dragon prow raised like a hound scenting rain. Her brother Bjorn had carved the stem himself, but it was Sigrun who had sanded the hammer into the wood beneath, tracing the knotwork until her fingers bled and the ravens on the warehouse roof turned their heads to watch. They came down every evening for the gutted herring, black and patient, and she had stopped shooing them.

On the last night before the sailing, Ketil the old boatwright climbed the slipway with a lantern and a bottle of mead. He looked at the two hulls for a long time, then at the wet sky above the fjord. "One of those ships is going to come home light," he said. "Pick which one you want to be heavy with the dead."

Sigrun didn't answer him. She went down to the water with the hammer pendant knocking against her collarbone and loosened the lashings on the ash mast. By dawn the wind had swung north and both crews were shouting for her. The faces on the sails stared out at the open sea, unblinking, as the oars struck the water in rhythm.

When the ships cleared the headland, a raven followed them out, flying low over the wake until it was only a speck above the grey swell, and then nothing at all.