Colour tattoo of a cartoon Tasmanian Devil tearing through torn skin on a leg, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tasmanian Devil tearing through skin

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cartoon Tasmanian Devil with a wide open mouth, bared teeth and a scowling expression, bursting out of a ripped opening in the skin. The bold black outlines and cel-style shading give the character a defined, graphic look, with blue highlights in its eyes. Warm browns, reds and white are used for the fur and teeth against the dark torn edges, and the design fills the frame on a limb with a plain background.

Neo-trad Other Cartoon character Torn skin Teeth Fur

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hanne Corrow was mending a goat-hide sack on the ridge when the hill split open and the Devil came out. It came out spinning, wide-mouthed, all teeth and brown fur, with eyes the blue of thin ice. Every child in Coldwater knows that much, and every child knows the grown-ups argue about the rest.

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The version Hanne's granddaughter told was the plain one. The Devil had been pressing at the skin of the hill since the sky first went grey, like a thing that wanted out. Nobody thought to ask it what it wanted. It wanted the wind, it said, and it wanted to bite something, and the valley was small enough that it could have both.

So the people of Coldwater did what people do with a tear in cloth. They gathered thread from every loom in the valley, twisted it into rope, and walked the Devil back down into the dark while they sang a song that went on far too long. At the mouth of the hole, Hanne pulled the last knot tight with her teeth, and the rope hummed like a plucked wire.

The hill still bears the scar, a ragged seam of black rock with a single brown tuft of grass at its centre. Children touch it on the way to school for luck. Nobody has ever found the knot, and on still nights the wind through the seam sounds very much like someone laughing.