Black and grey tattoo of two crossed bones with small Fig. 22 lettering on the inner upper arm, shaded in dotwork against a dark textured wall.

Crossed bones with Fig. 22 on the upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two long bones crossed in an X, each with rounded joint ends, drawn with dark outlines and textured shading. Fine dots and hatching model the bone surfaces, and a small caption reading Fig. 22 sits to the upper left with faint dotted leader lines. The image is in black ink and grey tones, photographed close up on the inner upper arm against a textured blue-grey wall.

Dotwork Upper arm Bone Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The printers wanted the twenty-second plate by Friday, and Mr Harrow had sent back my proof twice, saying the thighbones looked like a pair of tongs rather than anything a physician would trust. I had drawn cattle and cart horses for the county show for eleven years. Human bones were another matter, and the only ones within walking distance of Thornwood Lane were the ones the sexton's boy had turned up in the bracken that October.

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Each morning I took my satchel out past the lodge gate and sat on the mossy stump where the path forks. The femurs lay where the fox had left them, rain-bleached and smooth, their rounded ends worn to a sheen. Mrs Pell at the lodge said they were a shepherd's, lost in the snow of forty-seven, and that the wood kept whatever it was given. I hatched the long shafts with a fine nib, stippling the pitted places where the damp had got in, and I tried to make the joints look as though they could still turn.

On the third morning I found them crossed. I had left them lying side by side, but now one shaft lay over the other in a clean X, and the bracken beneath had been pressed flat in the same shape, as if someone had taken care over the angle. I stood a long while with the pen dry in my hand. Then I drew them exactly as they were and lettered the caption beneath in my best copperplate.

When the proof came back, Mr Harrow approved it without comment. The printer's boy asked me what the figure number meant. I told him it was only where the thing was kept.