Colour realism tattoo of the German flag appearing through torn skin on a man's calf, with a small black letter below it.

German flag under torn skin on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A man's lower leg shows a tattoo of the German flag in black, red and gold, drawn to look as if the skin has ripped open to reveal it. The flag stripes have soft shading and a glossy, three-dimensional finish, and the torn edges have pink and red tones around them. A small black letter in a blackletter style sits lower down on the calf, and the background is a dark leather seat.

Realism Calf Flag Torn skin Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Matthias had the lamp turned low when the calfskin split along the spine, and the hymnal's old cover peeled back like a bandage. He expected worm dust. Instead the boards beneath had been painted, and the paint was fresh enough to smell of linseed. Three bands ran across them: black at the top, then red, and at the foot a gold that caught the lamp and held it.

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Prior Lukas had told the novices that the abbey's books were sound and that nothing in the scriptorium had been touched since the great fire. Matthias did not argue with him. He carried the boards to the window instead and found a letter pressed into the wood beside the bands, a blackletter capital cut so cleanly it might have been struck yesterday. It was a D, and beneath it was a date in a hand he did not know, from the winter before the bells were recast.

He spent three nights with a scalpel and a jar of size, lifting the old cover a thread at a time. Folded flat under the paint was a slip of paper written by a binder named Ferdinand Hölz, who had sewn the volume and then, by the look of it, been told to stop. The note held one line: the colours are what we were, and the abbey may keep the rest.

Matthias read it twice, then glued the calfskin back over the boards, leaving a finger's width of gold showing at the tear. In the morning he set the hymnal on the lectern for Lauds, and the light from the east window fell across the open edge and made it burn.