Black and grey linework tattoo of a skeletal spine, ribcage and antlers running along the forearm, with part of another bird tattoo visible at the top edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal spine and antlers on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed black ink tattoo of a spine and ribcage runs down the forearm, with antlers at the top and pin-like marker lines extending from the bones. Fine, engraving-style linework and shading give the bones depth against the pale skin. The background is a weathered painted wooden wall in blue and white, and a portion of another tattoo, possibly a bird, appears at the top of the frame.

Forearm Skeleton Spine Ribcage Antler Bird Anatomy Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Margaret,

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The stag came in on the spring tide, snarled in a fishing net under the north rocks, and I have spent three evenings with it on the kitchen table while the lamp was being trimmed. You will say I should have left it for the gulls. Perhaps. But the antlers were still sound, their points sharp as a bread knife, and the spine had come away from the skull in one piece, each bone strung on its cord like beads nobody had bothered to lose.

I boiled the ribs in the copper until the smell drove the cat under the stairs, then picked them clean with the surgeon's hook you sent me at Christmas. Once the bones were dry I pinned them to a board, one pin for each joint, with a fine brass wire running from every one to a label I lettered in pencil: atlas, withers, the long keel of the breastbone. It looks like one of those plates from the anatomy books Father kept, the ones where the lines run off the page to tell you what is what.

What I did not expect was the stairs. When I stood the spine upright against the wall, the vertebrae climbed exactly as the tower stairs climb, a hundred and twelve steps of them, each one narrower than the last, and the ribs curved round the way the lamp room glass does. I sat with my tea going cold and felt I had built something rather than found it.

I hung the board beside the lamp room door last night. When the wind comes off the sea through the gap in the shutter, it moves through the ribs and makes a low note, not unlike the foghorn but kinder. Come at Michaelmas and hear it for yourself. Bring the good tea, and do not let the cat near the antlers.

Your brother, David