Photograph of a realistic tattoo of torn, bleeding wounds running down a person's calf, shown in a Realism style against a dark background.

Realistic gash wound on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A lower leg shows a tattoo of a jagged, open wound with torn edges, layered red and brown tones, and small drips of blood trailing downward. The skin texture, raised ridges and shading give the wound a three-dimensional look. The subject fills a vertical column down the centre of the frame against a near-black background.

Realism Calf Blood Torn skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road to Sallow Wells was cut the year the rains failed, and nobody in the valley could say who had done it. The tarmac split along a fault line the length of a man's arm, the edges curled up like paper left in a fire, and every lorry that came over the rise dropped its load of sand into the gash. Old Ruth Maddox from the filling station went out with a bucket of pitch and a hessian sack and tried to close it.

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She worked through three days of heat. Each night the crack opened a little wider, and each morning there was a thin dark line of seep at the bottom where the pitch had run out, glossy and red in the low sun. The drivers said it bled. Ruth said it only held water the way any wound does, and that a wound left alone goes proud and sore before it goes quiet. So she packed it with gravel and bound the tar over, and she told the boy who swept the forecourt to keep the children off the verge.

On the fourth night the wind came from the south with a smell of wet stone that nobody had smelled in two years. Ruth sat on the forecourt step and listened to the ground ticking as the heat left it. The boy came running up the track to say the wash behind the mesa was full, brown water moving fast, and that it had come down the cut in the road as if it knew the way.

By morning the seep had stopped and the edges had drawn together a little, pale at the rim where new skin was forming. Ruth never did get the road smooth, and she said that was fine. A road that has been hurt, she said, is one that people slow down for. The trucks took the bend at Sallow Wells more carefully after that, and nobody ever again asked her to fill the scar.