Small black and grey scorpion tattoo with shaded body and raised tail, sitting on the side of a person's ribs below a dark top.

Small scorpion tattoo on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small scorpion with its tail curled up and its pincers open is tattooed on the side of the ribcage. The body and legs are outlined with dark linework and shaded in greys, with fine detail on the segments of the tail. The ink is black and grey against warm skin, and the subject sits centrally in the frame with a dark garment at the top edge.

Ribs Scorpion 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 skipper wanted it over the side before the tide turned, but you were the one who had found it, folded up in the bottom of a crate of Cypriot lemons that had come aboard at Lowestoft with the ice. Nobody else on the Ellen Marr would touch that crate. You lifted the lid with a gutting knife and there it was, the colour of wet slate, its tail hooked up over its back like a question someone had forgotten to finish.

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Nine days out, the boat rolled through the Dogger in a grey swell and the hold stank of diesel and herring. You kept the scorpion in an empty jam jar wedged behind the chart table, with air holes punched in the lid using a nail. Old Hollis, who had hauled for forty years, said a thing like that would outlast the lot of you if it had a mind to, and that was the only reason you didn't sleep easy. Every time the net came up heavy, you thought about those pincers.

The turn came off Scarborough when the winch cable snapped and Hollis went down the hatch with a split lip. You patched him with tape in the galley, and when you looked up the jar was on its side, the lid gone, and the scorpion was walking the length of the table as if it had paid for the passage. It stopped beside your cup and raised its tail. You didn't move. Neither did it.

Back at the quay you carried the jar down the ramp in both hands and tipped it onto the warm stone of the fish market, where the gulls were already squabbling over the morning's skate. It slipped under a stack of empty crates with its pincers open, in no hurry at all. You stood there until the tail was gone from sight, thinking the sea had kept most of what it was given, and this once had handed something back.