Black and grey photograph of a man's back and raised arms covered in skeletal anatomy tattoos, including a skull, ribcage, spine and spiders.

Skeletal back and arms tattoo, black and grey

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man seen from behind with both arms raised against a dark textured wall, his back, shoulders, arms and hands covered in tattoos. The work shows exposed ribcage, spine, skull and interlocking bone and web-like linework, with shading that gives a dimensional, anatomical effect. The image is monochrome, with the tattoos and body lit against a deep charcoal background.

Back Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Hand Skeleton Skull Ribcage Spine Spider Web Brain Hand Bone Anatomy

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 been told not to touch the ossuary stair at Ravensholme until the lamp is lit, and you ignore it, because the spiders have already strung their silver across the third step and you want to see how far the web runs before the steward wakes. The castle has been a ruin for two hundred years, roofless since the fire, though nobody in the valley will say the name of the family that lived here. Your uncle left you his lamp, his ledger, the key to the charnel vault and one instruction in his cramped hand: count the ribs.

Keep reading

Inside, the bones are laid out like a sermon. Skulls sit on the shelves, spines coil in tin trays, and rib cages hang from iron hooks so the light through the arrow slits passes through them and throws ladders of shadow across the wall. Every one has a spider in it somewhere, a small grey thing resting in an eye socket or the cup of a pelvis, and each morning the web has crept a finger's width further across the arches. You have stopped sweeping them away. Your uncle said they kept the mice off the vellum, and he never lied to you about anything that mattered.

On the seventh morning the ledger falls open to a page you have never seen, in a hand that is not his. It lists a body, a name and a count of ribs, one more than any man should have. Beneath it someone has drawn a figure with both arms raised toward a window that is no longer there, and the webs across its shoulders have been inked with terrible patience. You stand where the figure stands, arms lifted to the broken sky, and the spiders begin, very gently, to climb.

The steward finds you at noon, still there, the lamp gone cold on the flagstones. He asks what you have counted. You tell him twenty-four, and you are certain of it, though the twenty-fifth bone has begun to ache along your left side, just where the web is thickest.