Realistic colour tattoo of a ribcage bursting through pink flesh on the top of a foot, with blue bones and dark shadowed tissue.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage tearing through skin on the foot

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A realistic tattoo covers the top of a foot, showing a blue-grey ribcage with rounded bone shapes and a curved rib running diagonally across it. Pink and magenta flesh appears to tear open around the bones, with dark shadowed tissue and a few small dark shapes at the edges. Shading is smooth and three-dimensional against a dark blue-black background, and a small faint tattoo sits near the toes at the lower right.

Realism Other Ribcage Bone Skeleton Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find it in March, when the frost has finally let go of the bed beneath the north wall. Your trowel strikes something that rings like a bucket, and when you scrape the clay away there is a curve of bone, blue-grey with age, rising out of the earth like the hull of an upturned boat. The soil around it is a raw pink, almost wet, as though the ground had been opened recently and had not yet healed.

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Mrs Harrow over the fence says her father buried a heifer there during the war, and that heifers do not come up with ribs as neat as piano keys. You don't argue. You spend the week with a stiff brush and a bucket of vinegar, washing each bone until the rounded knuckles show, and by the weekend the ribs have sprouted bindweed that threads between them like cord laced through a corset.

By June the arch stands a full man's height over the rhubarb. Foxgloves have come up along its base, leaning inward, and at dusk the wind passes through the gaps with a low note you can feel in your back teeth. You notice that you have started leaving the gate unlatched, and that the bed grows darker each morning in the exact shape of the curve, as if something beneath were drinking the light.

In August you cut the bindweed away. The roots let go of the bones with a sound like unlacing old boots. You leave one rib standing alone, bent like a crooked finger, and the following spring the foxgloves all lean towards it, patient as neighbours at a window.