Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rows of teeth on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two rows of individual teeth, including incisors, canines and molars, are drawn in bold black outlines across the upper arm. Most teeth are left unshaded, while several of the molars in the upper row carry a red fill. The composition is a neat, evenly spaced horizontal band against pale skin, with a striped shirt sleeve rolled above it.

Upper arm Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The box came through the crossing at Dover on a wet Tuesday, wrapped in a school jumper with the name tape still sewn in. The declaration said dental teaching aids, and the driver, a thin man who would not look at the lamp, said his sister taught at a college in Lille and had asked him to carry them over. I opened the lid on the steel counter. Inside, packed in cotton wool gone yellow at the edges, were thirty-odd teeth, loose and sorted, the way a child sorts conkers.

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Nobody had written on the box, but someone had arranged them with care. The front teeth lay in one row, narrow and sharp as the blades of a kitchen knife, and the back teeth in the other, broad and rooted and cupped like small stone bowls. Five of the molars carried a dab of red ink on the crown, a careful little stain on each, and I thought of the dentist who must have made the marks, flagging the ones that had been filled or saved.

I rang the college. A woman answered on the fourth ring and said her brother had been dead since March, and that the teeth were his own, pulled one by one over forty years of working on other people's mouths. She wanted them out of the flat and across a border before the solicitor came.

I signed the form and laid the teeth out on the counter in their two rows, the way he had kept them, and photographed them for the file. Then I put the lid back on and wrote the reference number in the margin, neat and even, like the spacing of a chart on a surgery wall.