Black and grey dotwork drawing of a human ribcage with spine and shoulder blades, set within a circle of ornamental floral swirls.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage and floral dotwork design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a ribcage with the upper spine and shoulder blades, shown in outline with stippled dotwork shading on the bones. Ornamental leaves and swirls fill the background and form a circular frame around the skeleton. The drawing is in black ink on a pale surface, with a black fine liner pen lying across the top edge.

Dotwork Botanical Ribcage Spine Skeleton Anatomy Floral Leaves Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the sketchbook open on the lost property counter before the 6.40 has finished sighing at platform four. Nobody has claimed it in eleven weeks, and the fine liner clipped to its spine has dried out in the cold. Every page holds the same drawing made again and again: a ribcage lifted from its body like a lantern from a boat, wrapped in fern fronds that curl the wrong way round, as though the leaves were trying to climb back inside.

Keep reading

The ticket stub tucked at page forty says Lessingham Junction to Ardwick, return, dated the night the storm took the signal box. You turn the leaves slowly. Someone has pencilled notes in the margins: stipple the left shoulder blade lighter, the sternum is a door, do not finish the lower ribs until the tide is out. You have never been to a tide in Lessingham. You have never met the hand that wrote this, though the stipple is so fine it must have taken years of patience and a steady wrist.

On the last page the drawing is finished and the circle of leaves is closed around it. Beneath, in the same small hand, is a line you read twice: Keep the cage open so the thing inside can get out. You close the book. Outside, the porter calls the Ardwick train and the doors thump shut one by one, and you realise the lamp on the counter has been lit for nobody but you.