Side-by-side X-ray of an arm with a metal plate and screws, and a realistic tattoo of a split, bloody wound with screws on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open wound and bone plate tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The left panel is an X-ray of an upper arm showing a long metal plate and several screws along the bone. The right panel is a photograph of an upper arm with a tattoo depicting a split, bloody wound that reveals bone-like tissue, a metal plate and screws. The shading is detailed and realistic, with red, pink and dark tones set against the skin.

Realism Upper arm Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Somewhere off Finisterre the number four hatch coaming gave way, and Dan Pell went down with it onto the iron grating, his left arm under him. I heard the bone go before I saw anything, a crack like a dropped spanner. By the time I reached him the second mate had his sleeve cut away and a lantern held high, and the arm was wrong in the way a bent rail is wrong, with the bone showing where no bone should be.

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The surgeon had a flat strip of steel in his chest, cut from a spare fitting, and a box of screws meant for bulkheads. He could not hold a drill steady in that swell, so he looked at me. I was the plater, the man who had spent eleven years riveting the Maud Ellery's hull into one piece. I told him I had never driven a bolt into a man. Pell, grey as the sea, said, "You've driven a thousand into my ship, Kit. Go on." So I did, by lamplight, with the deck lurching and the captain's cook holding the basin, counting holes the way I counted rivets on a long seam, one, two, three, each one true.

The arm stayed in its sling all the way to Valparaíso. Every evening Pell would lie on his bunk and ask me to run my thumb along the ridge of steel under the skin, the way a foreman checks a finished plate. The hospital by the harbour took a picture of it, a grey ghost of bone with a bright bar fixed down its length, and the nurse held it up to the window so we could see the screws catching the light.

When we tied up on the Tyne again, the yard foreman came aboard to inspect the work. He ran his palm along the old fitting, then along Pell's arm, and grunted. "Straight enough to hang a hat on," he said. Pell laughed so hard he had to hold the sling still, and I stood there thinking that a seam only holds if you trust the hand that made it.