Black and grey realism tattoo of a spine, ribcage and shoulder blade across a person's upper back, photographed in a bath.

Spine and ribcage tattoo across the back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a human spine with individual vertebrae running down the back, with curved ribs wrapping towards the side and a shoulder blade rendered on the right. The bones are shaded with smooth grey gradients, cast shadows and fine dark speckling, giving a three-dimensional, realistic effect. The image is a close, angled shot of the upper back with the person's head turned away, set against white bathroom tiles.

Realism Back Spine Ribs Ribcage Skeleton Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Marigold took the dead up the Wrenn that autumn, because the company that had bought the valley wanted the churchyard of Lower Ashby under twelve fathoms of water by Candlemas. Mary Coake had steered coal for her father since she was nine, and now she was paid by the coffin and the cart. She kept the count herself in chalk on the cabin door. Forty-one so far. Her mother had always said the river never gave back what it took, but nobody had asked the river.

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The company men dug and labelled, then went home to Birmingham before dark. Mary could not bear to leave anyone unfinished. At the lock at Sallow, a grave-digger's boy called Tobin dropped the lid of box thirty-eight, and the bones slid out into the straw. She knelt and gathered them the way her mother gathered eggs, spine first, bead by bead, as far as the hip. Then the ribs, which curved out like the staves of a barrel someone had sat on and cracked.

Her father had told her a body wants to be whole when it goes into the ground, or it comes looking. She did not believe that. She believed in the ledger. She laid the ribs in order and counted them twice. Tucked beneath them was a shoulder blade wrapped in its own shroud of linen, grey as a dove's wing. The chalk on the door still said thirty-eight, and the bones said the same, but the shoulder blade had a crack running through it like a river on a map.

She took the chalk and, under the forty-one, wrote Hannah Pell, the name Tobin had read off the lid. Then she slid the bones back into their box, lid open, and let the Marigold drift on past the willows toward the new ground on the hill, where the ledger would finally balance.