Realism tattoo on a ribcage with a red ribbon, a hand holding a red apple, a chess king and pawn on a checkered board, and script quote lines.

Chessboard, apple and red ribbon on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large colour tattoo covers the side of the ribs, showing a chessboard with a white king and a small red pawn at the lower edge. A red ribbon curls up the torso past a hand holding a red apple, with a red petal-like shape at the top. Three lines of fine script text sit between the motifs, and the shading is smooth and detailed, with a light grey background of the skin.

Realism Lettering Ribs King Apple Ribbon Hand Petal Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cider on the boards. This is the old Empress Ballroom on Canal Street, the one with the sprung floor that has bounced more feet than the tide has moved sand, and it was here, on a wet Tuesday the year the trams stopped, that Dora Quarmby beat a travelling man at chess while the band took its tea.

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He came in off the rain with a walnut box under his arm and a coat the colour of wet slate. Mr Abel Fenwick, he called himself, and he laid his pieces out on a corner table as if he were laying out a funeral. Dora was a dressmaker's girl with pins in her cuff and a red ribbon knotted at her wrist, and she had an apple in her coat pocket she had been saving for her supper. He said he would play any girl in the room for a shilling a move. She said she would play him for the apple, and he laughed until he saw she meant it.

They played until the fiddler had gone home. He was clever, I'll give him that, and he took her knight and her bishop with a smile like a shut door. She sat with her chin on her fist and gave up her pawns one by one, which the whole room thought was madness. When only her bare king was left against his queen and one stubborn pawn, she set the apple down beside that pawn and said, 'Reason says you take it, Mr Fenwick, and love says you let me keep it.'

He had taken the pawn, as reason required, and found that his queen had walked into a corner her own king could not follow. Checkmate, Dora said, and bit the apple in half. Out on the floor the band came back from its tea and struck up a waltz, and nobody on the boards that night could say who had really won.