Close photograph of a red dripping splash tattoo forming a heart shape with a dark keyhole-like centre, placed on the ribs.

Dripping red splash heart on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a heart-like arrangement of red paint-style splashes and drips radiating from a dark, keyhole-shaped centre. The shading is soft and glossy, with darker red and near-black areas inside the drips and a faint green tint near the middle. The design is shown on bare skin along the side of the torso, with the splashes spreading outward and running down the lower edge.

Ribs Heart Blood Splatter Drip Keyhole Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Teague had rung twice before the van reached Sheffield Road, and both times she had said the same thing: the front door had been splashed red in the night, the lock was full of it, and she would rather not involve the police. Ruth Halloran had been opening doors for nineteen years. She had used coat hangers, bank cards and once a cake fork. She had never been asked to clear paint out of a keyhole.

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The door had not been painted so much as thrown at. Red ran outward from a dark hole at the centre in ragged arcs, fanning over the wood and down the frame, then gathered at the threshold in long drips that had set into little tongues. When Ruth held her torch close, a faint green shimmer lay under the red around the metal, as though someone had stirred the paint with something from a jam jar at the back of a cupboard.

She worked the pick in slowly, scraping the set paint from the pins with a dental hook while Mrs Teague stood in the hall in a dressing gown, holding a mug that had gone cold. Eleven minutes later the barrel gave with a soft click, like a knuckle.

Inside, the flat smelled of turpentine. On the kitchen table sat a tin of green emulsion, a brush soaked flat, and a single brass key tied to a card. The card said only, in careful capitals, PLEASE DO NOT LOCK IT AGAIN. Ruth turned the key over in her palm, found it warm, and left it in the door on her way out, where a red drip slid down the bow and dropped onto her boot.