Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hands casting a profile shadow on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two hands clasped together, with their shadow cast onto the skin as a solid silhouette of a head in profile. The hands are rendered with soft, smooth shading and fine detail on the knuckles and nails, while the shadow is a flat, densely filled dark area. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and sits diagonally across the side of the ribcage against a plain, pale skin background.

Realism Ribs Hand Shadow Silhouette Profile Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming down on the market since four, and you have given up on the tarpaulins. Your father's stall sits under the arch by the fishmongers, and the lamp he bolted to the upright throws a white square onto the brick wall behind the cardboard boxes. You stand in front of it with your hands raised, the way he taught you when you were small enough to sit on the crate of onions.

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Tonight the crowd is thin and the punters keep their collars up. A boy with a wet terrier stops to watch. You fold your fingers together, knuckle against knuckle, and tilt the wrist until the shadow on the bricks becomes a profile: a brow, a nose, a mouth set against some old grievance. Your father used to say a shadow tells the truth a face is too proud to tell. He made this one for your mother the week before she left, and you have made it every night since without once asking him why.

The terrier barks. The boy laughs and the shadow jolts, and for a moment the profile seems to turn toward you, as if it has heard its name called from the far end of the street. You shake the rain from your sleeves and open your hands. The silhouette stays on the wall a half second longer than it should, then the lamp flickers and it is gone.

From the back of the stall your father asks whether you've sold the leeks. You haven't. But you pick up the lamp, angle it toward the brick, and make the shape again, slower this time, so the boy can see the whole face before the rain takes the light.