Side of a bare torso showing a tall Eiffel Tower tattoo on the ribs, drawn in black linework with watercolour-style splashes of red, green, blue and yellow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eiffel Tower on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the Eiffel Tower standing vertically along the side of the ribcage, with its lattice structure drawn in fine black linework. Loose watercolour splashes in red, green, blue, yellow and pink bleed out around the base and lower sections of the tower. The subject is shown against a plain dark background, with the upper arm raised across the frame.

Ribs Eiffel tower Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite Vallier had carried her paint box up the pass for three days, and by the time the mules balked at the snow line, the colours had begun to run together in their tins. Nobody in the valley of Saint-Aubin had ever seen a tower of iron. The surveyors who came to measure the gorge had left with their chains and their sour faces. She set the box on a flat stone and waited for the wind to drop.

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The old shepherd Joseph Ruel said the gorge had a name that meant 'the place that does not forgive', and that a tower had once stood there, built by a giant who wanted to see the sea. Every spring the iron lattice rose out of the mist for an hour, black as a thread, and then the cloud took it back. Marguerite meant to paint it before the mist arrived. She had only enough red left for one good stroke.

She worked quickly, a fine pen first, rivet by rivet, up to the little lantern at the top. Then the wind swung round and the mist came over the lip of the gorge, and she felt the whole tower lean towards her. She dipped the brush in the red, then the green, and flung the colour down at the base where the iron legs met the rock, so the cloud would have something to bleed into.

When the mist lifted on the third morning, the tower was still standing in the gorge, its lattice drawn fine and black against the stone. The red had run down into the scree and turned the pebbles the colour of cherries. Joseph came up with his goats, looked at the green and blue spilling over the path, and said nothing at all, which in that valley was the highest praise. Marguerite packed her tins and never went back, and the spring rain still carries pink down from that gorge every April.