Black and grey tattoo of a ribcage and laced spine with filigree scrollwork across the upper and lower back of a person facing away from the camera.

Laced spine and ribs across the back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the back, showing a ribcage-like structure running down a spine that is drawn as a corset with crossed lacing. Ornate scrollwork and faint floral shapes extend over the shoulders, and a band of ribbed detail continues below the waistline. The shading is entirely black and grey, with soft highlights giving the forms a three-dimensional look against bare skin.

Back Spine Ribs Corset Filigree Scrollwork Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Hardacre had laced the Ossuary Girl every night for eleven seasons, drawing the cord tight from the base of the spine up to the collar until the brass hinges clicked shut. Mr Ambrose Keel liked the crowd to hear the ratchet. Tonight the caravan smelt of wet canvas and paraffin, and the fair was packing up at Marlow Green before first light.

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The machine stood on its velvet plinth in the Hall of Wonders, ribs slatted like a birdcage made of old piano wire, scrollwork curling off its shoulders in iron ferns. Nell had repainted the filigree twice and knew every rib by its dent. Keel had sold the whole act to a man from Coventry who wanted it for a museum, and he was coming at noon with a hired lorry and no interest in the lacing.

She threaded the last cord slowly, crossing it over the eyelets the way her mother had taught her on a real bodice in a Hastings parlour. Halfway up, her fingers found that the cord ran through the frame and out the other side into nothing, as if it had never been meant to hold anything at all. She pulled one loop free and the whole structure sighed open, the ribs folding down like a closed fan.

At the gate the coachman asked what the thing had been. Nell thought about it for a while. "Something that needed holding together," she said, and walked out across the wet field with the loose lace coiled in her palm.