Black blackwork tattoo of a skeletal creature with a long curling spine-like tail, placed on the side of the ribs.

Skeletal creature with a curled tail on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black skeletal creature, with a skull, ribcage and spine, is tattooed on the side of the torso. A long, segmented tail curls up and over the upper flank toward the shoulder. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the design fills the frame against plain skin and light-coloured trousers.

Blackwork Ribs Skeleton Creature Skull Ribcage Spine Tail

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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

The net came up at four in the morning off the Dogger, heavy as a wet sack, and Harry swore at it the way he swore at everything before the first tea. You are the one sent to clear the mesh, because you have the smallest hands on the boat and the patience for knots. Tangled among the cod and the weed is something that should not be there: a skeleton as long as a rowing oar, its spine running in one unbroken curl from a skull to a tail that keeps coming out of the mesh long after you expect it to end.

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Skipper Doyle wants it over the side before the hold fills with ice. The skull is the size of a boot, all jaw and hollow sockets, and the ribs fan open like the frame of a boat left to rot on the shingle. Harry crosses himself and says it is a conger with ideas. You do not argue. You work the tail free one vertebra at a time, and every bone is black, not with tar, but with something that dries the colour of old ink on your fingers.

By noon the wind has turned and the catch is sorted, but the skeleton will not go. Each time it is lifted to the rail the net snags on the spine, as though the bones are holding on. So you lash it to the wheelhouse ledge, skull facing the harbour light, and tell yourself the cold is making you fanciful. At the next haul the trawl comes up with nothing but a single curled vertebra, neat as a coin, caught in the mesh.

You keep it in your coat pocket for the rest of the season. Some nights, when the boat rolls and the lamp swings on its chain, it presses against you like a stone that remembers the sea, and you find yourself listening for the rest of it, somewhere under the hull.