Black and grey realism tattoo on the top of a foot, showing muscle, tendons and bone as if the skin has peeled back over the toes.

Anatomical muscle and bone tattoo on a foot

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the top of a foot and the toes, depicting muscle, tendons and bone as if the skin has been peeled back. The shading is black and grey, with strong highlights and dark recesses that give the flesh and bone a three-dimensional form. A metal ruler sits along the left edge of the frame on a grey floor, and the foot is photographed from above.

Realism Other Foot Toe Bone Skin Anatomy

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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 bone-setter's almanac was the only dry thing left in the hold of the Mercy Dunmore by the fortieth day out of Valparaíso. Hollis Quarrie kept it wrapped in oilcloth beneath his bunk, a ledger of drawings made by lamplight, each page a body opened like a seed pod. Muscle went down in red chalk, sinew in grey thread-strokes, and bone in pencil he sharpened with his teeth. The crew called it the book of the drowned, though none of them had drowned in the way it meant.

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It was Ezra Pell, the cook's boy, who came to grief on the bowsprit. He caught his foot in a coil of hawser and came back with the top of it laid open, the skin folded down like a glove turned inside out. Quarrie cleaned the wound with rum and vinegar and named each strand aloud as he worked, as if the names might hold the flesh shut. The boy watched the lamplight move over the exposed tendons and asked if those were the strings that made it go. Quarrie said they were, and that he was lucky to see the machine so plainly.

Ezra slept poorly after that, and so did Quarrie. On the morning they raised the coast of New South Wales, the ledger was found on the capstan, open to a page Quarrie had never drawn. It showed a foot, the skin peeled back, every bone traced in careful ink, and beside it a second foot, smaller, with the toes drawn too long and a row of neat stitches across the instep. The boy swore he had never touched it. The mate swore the page was wet with salt, though the deck was dry.

Quarrie did not press him. He closed the book, wrapped it in oilcloth and carried it ashore in his own hands, and he never again let it out of his reach. Years later he would say the sea had merely been copying his work, and that it had never got the knuckles right.