Black and grey flash design of a ribcage, heart, spine and pelvis framed by serrated leaves, with no body placement shown.

Anatomical ribcage and pelvis with leaves, Cancer

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of an anatomical design showing a ribcage, heart, spine and pelvis, with serrated leaves below and radiating lines above. Fine line hatching and stippling define the bones and heart, while grey wash shading sits behind the ribs. The word CANCER appears beneath in serif capitals, with a lowercase italic line of text underneath.

Botanical Ribcage Heart Spine Leaves Ray Lettering

Find an artist for this

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 crab came up the shingle at Thrum Reach the morning after the Stillwater tide, carrying the sun's marks on its back like a ledger written the wrong way round. Nobody wanted it. Ota Vane, who kept the salt pans and had buried two husbands and a dog, said she would take it on, having nothing left to be frightened of.

Keep reading

She fed it limpet meat from a tin bucket and talked to it the way she talked to the gulls who stole her bread. It learned her name from the way she tapped the rim. In the cold months she carried it inside her coat, and the bones it had grown in the sea, pale rods and a hinged pelvis of driftwood and shell, clicked against her as she walked. The village said she was making a fool of herself. Ota said a fool who fed a crab was still only feeding a crab.

When the rays came down the next June, the crab climbed the old lighthouse steps and stood in the lamp room with its claws lifted toward the glass. The keeper's boy found it there at dawn. Ota was asleep on the step below, one hand resting on the shell, and a green shoot of sea-kale had pushed up through the gap in the iron rail beside her.

They buried nothing that year. They planted the kale along the steps instead, and it grew thick and serrated, so that from the sea the lighthouse looked like a heart hung with leaves. The crab went back to the water in autumn, sideways and unhurried, and never looked back. Every summer after, the kale came up through the iron, and the light caught the old lens and laid a crooked line of gold across the whole of Thrum Reach.