Black and grey Viking warrior tattoo covering the upper arm and forearm in a full sleeve, with a horned helmet, beard and round shield.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Viking warrior full sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bearded Viking warrior in a horned helmet and fur-trimmed armour fills the upper arm, with a round shield bearing a horned animal motif and a spear or staff at the edge. The design continues down the forearm into more armour, chainmail-like texture and a shield edge. The work is in black and grey with smooth shading and fine detail in the helmet, beard and metalwork.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Warrior Beard Shield Armour Spear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrow Court has been broken since Tuesday, so I am taking the stairs like a girl of forty, which Mr Okafor on eleven says is a lie. I told him to mind his knees. I am writing this on the back of the council's notice about the bins because the good paper went on the window man, and he has still not come.

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You asked on the phone about Grandad's drawings, so I went through the tin under the bed. Most are birds and bad portraits of me. But there is one he did for the lodger's boy in 1979: a big fellow in a horned helmet, a beard like a hedge in March, a round shield with a goat-faced beast painted on it, and a spear leaning out of the corner as if it was waiting for a bus. He called the man Stig, after nobody we knew. Grandad could never draw a straight line, but he could make a beard look like weather.

The residents' group voted down a mural for the stairwell, so one night he went down with a tin of the caretaker's emulsion and painted Stig on the wall between the fourth and fifth floors anyway. In the morning the council sent a man with a bucket and a face like a wet Sunday. Grandad stood at the bottom and said nothing, which for him was a speech. The wall still shows a shadow of that shield if the light is low.

This morning I carried the drawing down all fourteen floors, one landing at a time, and at the bottom I held it up against the grey wall by the bins. Stig looked like a man about to walk out into the car park and get on with his day. Come at Easter. Bring tape and your good scissors. Love, Babcia.