Black and grey realism tattoo of rolled banknotes and cut diamonds in an oval dish, placed on the side of the ribs.

Cash and diamonds in a dish on the side

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded tattoo of an oval dish or tray filled with rolled banknotes marked with the numeral 100 and several faceted diamonds. The rendering uses smooth greyscale shading, highlights and cast shadows to give the objects volume. The design is centred on pale skin with other tattoos, including a figure and a winged bird, visible at the edges of the frame.

Realism Ribs Money Banknote Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the Thursday boat noses into the harbour, you have already counted the tray twice. Hundreds at the bottom, rolled tight and banded the way Hector Ross always rolled them, as if each note were a cigar he meant to smoke later. Two cut stones sit on top, catching the lamp like the eyes of something that has decided not to look at you.

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The island takes what it is given and gives back very little. Your father ran the net store on the quay for thirty years and never let a stranger past the curtain into the back room. When the mainland men came over in October with their leather cases and their polite voices, they set the tray on his counter and called it a wager, nothing more. You wrote the sum in the ledger in pencil, because pencil can be rubbed out, and because nobody on Skerra trusts ink.

The weather came in on the Friday. The mainland men never came back for the tray, and the boat never came at all. By Sunday the sea had taken the bottom steps of the slipway and half the creels, and you sat in the back room with the tray on your knees, working out what a hundred pounds might buy for a widow who owed the store for flour and paraffin.

You peeled off one note and folded it into the flour tin. Then you carried the rest down to the water, where the tide was already climbing over the stones. You tipped the tray. The diamonds went under without a sound, and the notes unrolled on the grey swell, each one showing its small printed hundred until the sea had read every one of them.