Realistic penny coin on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed tattoo of a penny coin sits on the side of the torso, with a shaded profile portrait facing left and a raised rim. The shading gives the coin a metallic, three-dimensional look, with soft greys and dark outlines defining the edges. The coin is centred on bare skin, with a purple fabric edge along the left side of the frame.

Realism Ribs Coin Portrait Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vending machine on Ward Six has swallowed your last pound again, so you dig through the pockets of yesterday's scrubs and find a bus ticket, a biro cap and a penny gone soft at the rim. The old king's head on it faces left, toward the door, as though he has heard someone calling him from the corridor and is not quite ready to answer.

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Night staff on Ward Six have an unwritten rule about loose change. You don't spend it on the machine. You drop it in the chipped wooden bowl by the station, and at the end of the month Maureen from days carries the lot to the children's play area and pretends she has counted it. You feed the penny in anyway, because the tea is the only thing keeping your eyes open at three in the morning, and the machine gives you nothing but a lukewarm cup and a hiss.

In Bay Four, Walter Pryce is awake, and he wants the football results read aloud, every division, slowly. When you reach the end of the scores he opens his fist on the blanket. There is a penny in it, worn almost flat. His wife, he tells you, gave it to him in 1961 for the bus fare to Blackpool, and he never spent it because she said it would bring him home. He presses it into your palm and closes your fingers over it. "Keep it warm for me," he says, and by half past five he has gone quietly, the way the tide goes out.

You don't put the penny in the bowl. In the morning you turn it over once in the car park, the light coming up grey over the bins, and you slide it into the breast pocket where your pen lives, the king still facing left.