Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Winged skulls, sword and shield design
Black and grey · Flash
The image shows two separate tattoo-style designs on a white background. The upper design has a sword pierced through a shield, with two skulls and a pair of feathered wings above it. The lower design shows two crossed swords framing an empty shield, drawn in solid black with decorative hilts and blade details.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mrs Ivy Penhale had been told the crest was for a lifeboat crew, so she painted it for a lifeboat crew, though nobody in Porthgarrow would say which one. The sign was to hang over the door of the Mariner's Rest, a boarding house on the cliff road, and it needed two skulls with feathered wings spread above a shield. She mixed the silver in a saucer, thinned it with linseed, and waited for the wind to drop off the bay.
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Her nephew Danny carried the ladder out from the scullery and held it steady while she climbed. He asked what the swords were for. She said the swords were for keeping the shield honest, and he laughed, but she had meant it. A shield with nothing crossed over it was only a plate. Her husband had cut the grip of the sword from a length of ash that still hung in the shed, waxed dark from years of his hands.
Halfway through the second skull, a van pulled up below and a man in a wet anorak asked whether the Rest had rooms for three nights. Ivy kept painting. She told him the kettle was on and the key was under the boot scraper. When she finally came down, the sign was dry enough to touch, and the shield held a single pale stroke at its centre, where she had meant to paint a name and had not, because she did not yet know whose it was.
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