Black line tattoo of two lungs and a windpipe on a person's side ribs, with hatched dotwork on the left lung and geometric triangles on the right.

Anatomical lungs on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a pair of lungs joined by a branching windpipe, drawn in black linework. The left lung is filled with hatching and stippled dotwork, while the right lung is built from angular geometric triangles. The skin is lightly freckled, and a black lace bra sits along the lower edge of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Fine line Ribs Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair reached Marrowby Green on the last Thursday of September, three caravans and a steam organ that played every hymn a half tone flat. Ada Pell kept the forge tent at the far end, where she worked two bellows joined by a brass branch of pipe. The left bellows was stitched from soft calf and ridged with fine lines she had hatched by hand through a long winter. The right was cut from old striped tent canvas, pieced into triangles that never sagged.

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The organ broke on the Friday, a split reed that left the dancers stamping in silence. Silas Crane, the travelling man, offered a shilling to anyone who could mend it before dusk. Wat Dorrington, the fourteen-year-old who fed the coals, said the bellows could push air through the pipe if it was blown hard enough. Ada laughed at him, then took the brass branch from the forge wall and fitted it to the organ's bellows box.

It took them all night. The calf bellows tired first, its ridges creaking at every squeeze, while the canvas ones stayed true. Ada worked them in turns, one breath after another, until the reed sang clean at dawn. Silas paid the shilling and said nothing about the hour. Wat asked why they did not use the canvas pair alone.

Ada said the calf wanted resting and the canvas did not, and that was the whole secret of a pair. She hung the pipe back on its hook, the two bellows dangling either side like folded wings, and the caravans rolled east before the frost. In the cold tent they went on breathing slowly, one soft and one sharp, until the fire was cold.