Two side-by-side photographs of a realistic tattoo of a jigsaw puzzle piece with a torn, bloodied edge and red drips on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Puzzle piece with dripping wound on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two photographs show the same forearm from different angles, each with a jigsaw puzzle piece tattooed near the wrist. The piece has a raised, three-dimensional look with a torn, split edge, and red drips run down from its base. The shading is grey and dark brown with red accents on the drips, and the tattoo sits centrally on the forearm against a dark background.

Realism Forearm Puzzle piece Blood Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had carved the valley's map from larch for the abbey gate, a hundred and twelve pieces, each one a field or a stream or a bend in the river. On the feast of Saint Brannoc the piece for the mill went missing, and the new novice, Tomas, was blamed because he had been seen in the workshop with a knife.

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Tomas went looking through the snow with a lantern and found the mill piece at the bottom of the millrace, wedged against a stone. When he lifted it, the split edge was wet and dark, and a thin red thread ran from the grain and dripped onto his mittens. The miller's wife, who had come up for the feast, crossed herself and said the larch had been cut from a tree that grew over a grave.

Tomas did not believe her, but he carried the piece back up the hill and found that it would fit nowhere on the board. Every night the drips returned, so he set it on the workshop sill and left the shutter open to the cold. By Lent the wood had dried to a pale, flat grey, and the gap in the valley had closed over, grass growing where the mill had stood.

Nobody could say whether the mill had come back or had only been forgotten. Tomas kept the piece in his coat until he was old, and the monks dusted around a faint red stain on the sill long after the novice was buried below the chapel wall.