Black and grey realism tattoo of several snowflakes with soft shading, running down the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snowflake cluster tattoo along the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several snowflakes of different sizes stacked down the side of the torso, with the largest near the upper ribs and smaller ones toward the hip. Their crystalline arms are rendered with light, pale highlights over darker grey shading that gives them depth and a soft, misty background. The photograph is taken against a plain black backdrop, with a white shirt lifted at the top and low-rise jeans and a striped waistband at the bottom.

Realism Ribs Snowflake Winter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, you lot at the back, stop passing that flask about and listen, because this is the bit Gordon never tells at reunions. Forty-one years ago he was the boy who climbed onto the bus shelter roof in Bradfield every January with a sheet of black velvet and a magnifying glass, trying to catch snowflakes before they melted on his sleeve. Nobody believed him. His mum thought he'd lost his marbles, and the head thought he'd end up in the lost property box by Easter.

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The trouble was the flakes never sat still long enough. He'd get one, a six-armed thing thin as a fingernail, and by the time he'd fetched the hand lens from the science cupboard it was a dot of wet. So he started drawing them instead, in the back of his geography jotter, arm by arm, shading the hollows dark so the pale bits stood proud, the way frost lifts off a window when the sun gets behind it. Mrs Hadley caught him at it in double maths, took the jotter off him, turned three pages over and went very quiet.

She'd been a crystallographer before she came to teach us, she said, and she kept a box of her own drawings from a winter in Norway. Over the next fortnight she and Gordon sat in the cold lab with a tray of dark card and a torch, catching the big flakes that came in late January, the ones with arms wide as your palm. Every one they caught, they drew twice, once on card and once in biro across the back of their own hands, so the lines would last until the frost came back.

Gordon still has that card. At his fiftieth he showed me the wallet-sized sketch he'd carried all these years, a flake with its arms spread wide and its hollows gone dark as a winter night. He said the best thing about it was that it never melted. Mind, that's a tale for another pint, so drink up before the foam goes flat.