Black and grey realism tattoo of a clawed hand tearing through skin, placed on the shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand tearing through skin on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large hand with clawed fingers pushing out through a torn opening in the skin. The knuckles, tendons and finger creases are shaded with smooth gradients, and the torn edges have soft highlights and shadows that give depth. The image is in black and grey and is framed closely on the shoulder and upper back.

Realism Shoulder Hand Torn skin Claw Finger

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the draught from the door, because the snow has found the gap again. You want the tale of the Pennick house? Then fetch the jug, Dorrie, and don't keep looking at the window while I talk.

Keep reading

The Pennicks had a parlour wall that a plasterer named Hal Maudsley was paid to strip in the hard winter of the great frost. Under the damp paper was old lath, and under the lath the wall was soft as bread. He pressed a thumb into it and the plaster split along a line as neat as a seam, and out of that seam came fingers. Long grey fingers, the nails black and curved like the hooks on a gutting knife.

Hal dropped his trowel. The hand closed on the lamp bracket and drew itself a little further out, the knuckles working, the skin around the tear peeling back in wet strips. Mrs Pennick came in with her shawl and said the house had always done that, that it wanted something back. She pressed a shilling and a candle into Hal's hands and told him to plaster it over by morning, or leave the house to the hand.

He did not plaster it over. He sat up with the candle until the frost cracked the windows, and when the flame guttered the hand slid back into the dark with a sound like wet cloth being folded. In the morning the wall was whole and smooth as a pond. The shilling, though, stayed warm in his palm. Hal kept it, and he has never once put his bare hand to a damp wall since.