Black and grey realism tattoo of a waving flag with stars, shaded in soft greys, on a person's forearm.

Waving flag with stars on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic tattoo of a waving flag fills the forearm, with a row of white stars across the upper left field. The flag's folds are rendered with smooth grey shading, soft highlights and dark creases that suggest movement and fabric texture. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and is photographed straight on against a blurred dark background.

Realism Forearm Flag Star

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 wind had torn the flag clean off its pole at the top of Harrow Keep, and I found it at dawn snagged on the broken crenellations like a shroud nobody had come to collect. My father would have sworn at it. I climbed the spiral stair with a coil of tarred line over one shoulder and my boots slipping on the wet stone, counting the steps because counting kept my hands steady.

Keep reading

The cloth was heavier than it looked when I pulled it free. My grandmother had cut it from the lining of a wedding coat the year the war ended, and she had punched the stars out of an old biscuit tin with a nail and sewn each one down by lamplight. Some of the stitching had gone grey with salt. I folded it over my arm the way she taught me, corners to corners, and it still held the shape of the wind that had flung it.

The halyard had frayed through at the cleat, so I threaded new line through the pulley, feeling the grit of the old rope under my thumbs. Below, the village lay grey along the harbour wall, and no boats had gone out since Tuesday. Across the bay a single lamp burned in the lighthouse window. Tom had promised he would answer if I lit anything, and I had not believed him until that moment.

I hauled. The flag rose jerking, caught the air with a crack like a sheet on a line, and filled out over the sea in long, creased folds of pewter and silver against a sky the colour of wet slate. The stars caught whatever light there was. Down in the village a door opened, then another, and people came out onto the quay with their hands shading their eyes to look up at it.