Split head anatomy and galaxy on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A profile head is split down the middle: the left half is shaded in black and grey with detailed hair and an ear, while the right half reveals coloured anatomical sections of the nose, sinuses, mouth and throat. The right side of the head sits against a dark night sky with stars, a ringed planet, a red planet and a nebula in soft shading. The piece is set within a clean circular outline on a leg, with strong contrast between the monochrome and colour halves.

Realism Calf Head Profile Anatomy Mouth Galaxy Planet Star Nebula Ear Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Rennie had kept the lamp at Skerrow Point for eleven winters before anyone found the anatomy book her husband had hidden behind the oil cans. Morag, the relief keeper's daughter, found it on a wet Tuesday in October and brought it up the iron stairs with her boots still dripping. The page that fell open showed a head split clean down the middle, one half skin and hair, the other a ladder of passages, the nose, the sinuses and the throat running down like a drainpipe.

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Ada took the book and turned it to the window. The sky had cleared for once, and the beam swept slowly over the swell. She had never understood why her husband, who could not hold a hymn tune to save his life, kept a picture of the inside of a man's mouth beside a star chart. In the margin, in his careful pencil, he had written: the sky is only the throat of the night, you have to breathe it in. For eleven years she had thought it nonsense.

Morag asked what the planets were called. Ada read them off the almanac on the shelf, Saturn with its rings, Mars the red one, and found herself saying them the way he used to, slowly, as if counting out change. Down at the boathouse the foghorn gave its long flat note, and for once Ada did not flinch.

When the relief boat came in at dawn, Ada pressed the book into Morag's hands. "Take the stars home," she said. "I'll keep the throat." Then she climbed back up to the lamp room and, before she trimmed the wick, breathed on the cold glass and watched the light come on through her own fog.