A large black and grey biomechanical ribcage tattoo with laced corset details and scrollwork across a woman's bare back.

Biomechanical ribcage back piece

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera shows a large tattoo covering most of her back, depicting a segmented ribcage and spine with laced corset-style detailing. Fine shading and highlights give the bones and laces a three-dimensional, metallic look, with ornate scrollwork spreading over the shoulders. The dark background and soft lighting focus attention on the tattoo, with one arm raised and a red garment visible at the bottom edge.

Realism Back Ribcage Spine Corset Lace Scrollwork Biomechanical Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aldous Penhallow had been dead eleven days when Harriet came up the back stairs with the lamp and found the frame still standing in the north window, its ribs bent open like the doors of a cathedral. Nobody had dared to lace it. The brass spine ran from nape to hip, every vertebra stamped with a small number, and the cords hung loose between the bars as if someone had meant to draw them tight and lost their nerve.

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She had been apprenticed to the old man for three winters and knew the clicking of his escapements better than her own pulse. She took the spool of waxed black cord from its hook, threaded the first eyelet, and felt the frame shift under her palm, a slow tick, like a clock deciding whether to start. Downstairs the bell of St Peter's struck eleven. She counted each stroke against the stamped numbers and drew the cord to match.

By the ninth stroke the ribs had closed around nothing at all, a cage with the shape of a waist. She stepped back. Scrollwork had crept over the shoulder plates as the old man had drawn it, silver wire curling like frost on glass. The frame breathed in once, a sound like a bellows, then went still, and the cord was laced so snugly she could not have slipped a fingernail between.

Harriet went down to bed and left the lamp burning. In the morning the bench was bare, the spool empty, and the north window stood open on the frost. Pinned to the wood by a brass tack lay a single sheet in his cramped hand: Lace it firmly, child, and it will carry you where I could not.