Realistic full arm tattoo of red muscle fibres and tendons, shaded in dark tones, running from the forearm up to the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Muscle anatomy sleeve on a forearm and upper arm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a full arm sleeve depicting layered muscle fibres and tendons, with the anatomy rendered in reds, pinks and deep shadowed browns. The shading is smooth and gradual, giving the forms volume and a three-dimensional look. The arm is held out against a plain pale wall, with the tattoo filling the frame from the wrist to the upper arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your hoods up and stand closer, the lot of you, because the rain has come in off the river and means to stay till Thursday. Good. Now you want the one about Hester Bramble and the drawing book, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, under the awning of the fish stall where the gutters run.

Keep reading

Hester kept a rope stall on this very market, back when the ropewalk still ran down to the water. She could tell hemp from sisal with her eyes shut, and she knew that a good cord is never one thing but a hundred fibres lying down together, each pulling its own way and all of them holding. A surgeon from the city paid her a shilling a page to draw what she saw in the cords, so his students might learn the body from something plainer than a corpse. So she sat up nights with her lamp and her red chalk and drew bundles and bands, sheaves wrapping over sheaves, the long pale ropes that lift a hand.

Here is the strange part, and I won't swear to it. Every page she finished, she said the cords grew a little tighter in her own wrists. She could not lift a full pail without the old ache of lifting it twice. The surgeon thought her fanciful and stopped paying, so she sold her last drawing to a sailor for a cup of gin. He carried it off in his oilskin, and the rain took him somewhere past the bar, and nobody has seen it since.

So when you hear a cord snap on a wet morning, you may think of Hester, who drew the muscle of the world and gave away her own grip. Mind your change. The rain's getting into the till.

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