Black and red tattoo design of a sword over a red cross shield, flanked by wings, with a banner reading Accipite Armaturam Dei.

Winged sword and shield with banner

Mixed · Flash

A symmetrical design of a upright sword with a crossguard, set in front of a shield with a red cross, with dark feathered wings spreading out on either side. A ribbon banner across the lower half carries the lettering Accipite Armaturam Dei in black script. The bold black linework is combined with flat red fill on the shield cross, and the design is shown centred on a plain white background.

Sword Shield Cross Wing Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, the wind won't fill us for another hour, and you'll hear the rest of it or nothing at all. Pass me that tin cup. Now. The smith at Calder's Reach was called Hobb Ingram, and he did not like his work looked at twice. He had one blade on his bench that season, a plain sword for a captain's son going east with the Lord Marshal's levy, and the boy's mother came down to the yard every morning to ask whether it was done.

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Hobb took his time. He ground the fuller until the light ran down it like water, then he fitted a crossguard and wrapped the grip in grey eel-skin. Last, he walked to St Maddock's and begged the priest for the words, because he could not spell the Latin and would not be laughed at for trying. The priest wrote them on a strip of parchment, Accipite armaturam Dei, take up the armour of God, and Hobb had them painted on a long ribbon that curled beneath the blade like a dropped scarf.

The shield was the boy's own, oak bound in iron, and his mother wanted a cross on it for the order he'd been promised to. Hobb painted it red because the only red paint in the parish was the stuff for the church door, and the sexton would not give him more. The wings he added last, out of pure stubbornness, since the captain had said no shield in that company had ever flown anywhere.

The boy never came home to see it. Hobb kept the sword on the wall of his forge for forty years, and when children asked why a thing that could not fly had wings, he would lift it down, tilt it so the light slid off the fuller, and say nothing at all.