Colour tattoo of an anime character with red hair and blue eyes, appearing to burst through torn skin on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anime character torn through skin on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style male character with red hair, a forehead marking and blue eyes looks out from behind a ripped-skin effect. The linework is bold, with soft shading on the face, clothing and torn edges. Red, blue and flesh tones dominate, with grey shading in the clothing, and the design fills the upper arm.

Upper arm Torn skin Red hair Blue eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shutter on Eldon Street had been rolled down for three winters when Mrs Okafor asked Tomasz to paint something on it that would stop the boys tagging it. He stood on a stepladder with a tin of primer at his feet and studied the grey metal for a long time, then the photograph she had pinned to the frame: a scowling boy with a crimson fringe, a small mark pressed into his forehead, and eyes the blue of a gas ring.

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He worked through the first week in the cold, laying down the flesh tones of a face, then the dark grey of a collar, then the red that made the whole street look like it was holding its breath. The hardest part was the tear. He wanted the boy to seem to be shouldering out of the metal, so he peeled the rust back in curling strips and let the bright paint underneath show through like something that had been waiting there all along.

On the Friday a boy of about nine sat on the kerb with a can of cola, watching. He asked whether the figure was real. Tomasz said he was only a drawing, the sort of boy you found in the back pages of a comic, and the child considered this for a while before announcing that the drawing looked tired, as if he had been pushing against something for a very long time.

Tomasz didn't answer. He dabbed a spot of white onto the edge of the tear where the light caught it, and the boy finished his cola and wandered off. Next morning the shutter was untouched, except that someone had wedged a single bottle cap into the gap at the bottom, exactly where a hand would rest if the boy were pushing his way through.