Black and grey anatomical tattoo of thigh muscles with labels such as rectus femoris and patella, shown on an upper leg in a Realism style.

Anatomical muscle study on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the outer thigh and runs down toward the knee, showing layered muscle fibres with printed labels such as rectus femoris, tensor fasciae latae, iliotibial tract, patella and biceps femoris. The linework is fine and the muscle bodies are softly shaded in grey, giving a dimensional, illustrative look. The image is in colour, with a patterned skirt and hands at the top of the frame.

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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 rain has found the gap in your awning again, and it drips onto the trestle where the loose plates lie in a biscuit tin. Mr Adeyemi on the next stall shouts that you'll ruin the paper, so you drag the tin under the tarpaulin and sort by hand. The plates came from a house clearance in Leeds, a dead surgeon's atlas pulled apart by a nephew who wanted cash more than anatomy. Each sheet smells of camphor and somebody's pipe.

Keep reading

The one you keep turning over shows a leg opened like a map, its muscle fibres fanned out like the vanes of a feather, each strand drawn with a hairline nib. In the margin someone has written the Latin in pencil: rectus femoris, patella, biceps femoris. You doubt a surgeon wrote them. The hand is looser and rounder, the vowels leaning forward as if the writer was impatient to reach the next word.

A woman in a yellow mac stops and asks whether the leg is for sale. You say no, which is a lie, because everything on the table is for sale. She buys six other sheets, pays in coins from a purse with a broken clasp, and leaves you with the rain. When the cloud thins you hold the leg plate up to the grey light and follow the iliotibial tract with your thumb, the way you once followed the Aire on a school map.

In the bottom corner, faint as a watermark, there is a signature: Clara Vane, Life Drawing, 1931. You pin the sheet above the stall where the drip can't reach it. By closing time the ink is still dry, and the names stay legible in the dusk, muscle by muscle, all the way down to the knee.

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