Black and grey realism tattoo of a laurel-wreathed Roman figure in a draped toga across a man's ribs and chest, with a cherub on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roman laurel-wreathed figure on ribs and chest

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a classical sculpted figure with a laurel wreath and draped toga, holding a long staff across the body. Smooth grey shading and fine detail give the portrait a three-dimensional, stone-like finish. A partial cherub figure appears on the upper arm and shoulder, and the composition wraps around the torso.

Realism Ribs Chest Upper arm Laurel wreath Statue Portrait Cherub Staff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The marble man has stood at the edge of Ashcombe Wood since before the village had a name, and every spring the lichen comes back on his shoulder faster than you can scrape it. You are the one who scrapes it now. Old Mrs Pryor handed you the wire brush and the vinegar bottle the winter her hands gave out, and she told you the statue was not to be washed, only kept, because a thing that is kept does not go wandering.

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Mostly he looks down the lane toward the mill, his laurel chipped at one temple, his cloth gathered at the hip like a man who has just set down something heavy. The staff across his body has a crack near the top that you have decided is weather rather than a blow. You talk to him while you work. You tell him about the price of barley and the forge boy who keeps climbing the oaks, and he goes on gazing past you as if the answer is somewhere down the road.

On the Tuesday after the floods you find a small stone foot in the ferns beside the plinth. It is a child's foot, carved, chipped at the heel, its toes rounded like a cherub's. Someone has pressed it into the moss so that it stands upright, deliberately. You carry it home in your coat pocket and say nothing to Mrs Pryor, who would tell you the wood keeps its own accounts.

That evening you go back with the foot and a bucket of water, and at the statue's base you find its twin, a matching wing half sunk in the mud. You set both pieces where they belong. The marble holds the cold for a long time, and when you lay your palm against his chest it is still warm from the afternoon sun, as though he has been waiting, with great patience, to be finished.