Black and grey tattoos cover a person's back, arms and hands, with skull, ribcage and spine imagery against a dark background.

Full back and arms covered in skeletal tattoos

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind with their head bowed and arms raised forward, so the back, shoulders, arms and hands are all visible. The skin is covered in detailed black and grey linework and shading, with skeletal, ribcage and spine motifs across the back and skull imagery on the head area. The dark, plain backdrop keeps the focus on the tattoos and the body's pose.

Back Upper arm Forearm Hand Skull Skeleton Ribcage Spine Arm Hand Knuckle Lettering Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the 9.14 is forty minutes late and the kettle's still hot, so you'll hear the whole of it. My grandmother's cousin Ivy worked the ticket hatch at Carlisle Lane halt in the years when the trains still ran on coal, and she knew a man called Mr Abel Tanner who came through every Thursday with a leather case and a drawing board. He had been a surgeon once, before his nerves gave out, and now he drew the bones of the living for the infirmary's medical school. The bones were all he cared about.

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One wet Thursday in March he missed the last train and sat on the bench beneath the clock with his case open. Ivy brought him tea and saw that every sheet inside was a skeleton, dozens of them, each standing with its arms raised as if asking the sky for mercy. 'Nobody sees the frame underneath,' he told her, 'not the navvies, not the duchesses. I want them to.'

He started drawing straight onto the men who would sit still for a shilling, spines first, then ribs fanning out like the spokes of a wheel, then the small bones of the hands, which he said were the hardest because they never stopped moving. Ivy swore the lines seemed to shift when the gas lamps flickered. On the last night before the branch line closed, a porter came down the platform with a lantern and found Tanner's bench empty, his case shut, and a single rib lying on the seat, drawn in ink so fine it caught the light like wire.

The porter picked it up. It was still warm. Ivy kept it in her till drawer for forty years, and when she died my mother found it wrapped in a hankie and put it straight back where it belonged. Right, there's your train. Mind the gap, and mind the stairs, they're older than the both of us.