Two side-by-side photos of a man's torn-skin tattoo revealing an American flag across his upper chest and shoulder, and across his upper back.

American flag torn-skin design on shoulder and back

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The image shows two views of the same tattoo: a torn-skin effect on the upper chest and shoulder, and a larger version across the upper back. The flag is coloured in red and blue with white stars and stripes, while the ripped edges, shadows and surrounding skin are rendered in black and grey with bold outlines. The left view also shows a black and grey sleeve tattoo on the upper arm, and the right view is a close, evenly lit shot against a plain white background.

Shoulder Chest Back American flag Torn skin Star Stripe Blood drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo never once let me touch the brush on a flag, not even the stripes, and by the third week of the summer I had stopped asking. He had me grinding ochre on a slab in the back of the shop on Harbour Row while he worked the big board for the Dolphin Hotel, lettering it letter by letter with his tongue between his teeth.

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The board was going up over the door of the new ballroom, and the landlady wanted a flag beneath the name, painted as if it had been torn off the wall and was hanging in strips. She wanted it to look like the old paint had split and the bare timber showed through. Okonedo said that was nonsense, that wood did not rip like cloth, and then he spent four days doing exactly that, feathering the edges with a dry sponge so the red looked raw underneath.

On the Saturday before the regatta a squall came in off the mole and tore the first board clean off its bracket. It landed face down in the car park with a crack like a rifle. Okonedo stood over it in the rain and said nothing for a long while. Then he knelt, wiped the grit off with his sleeve, and laughed so hard he had to sit on the kerb.

The split had gone straight through the stars and left the blue showing in the gap, exactly as he had painted it, only now it was real. The landlady paid him in full. He kept the broken board above his bench for years, and I still think of it whenever I see a flag hung out in a gale.