Sepia photograph of three fine line tooth tattoos on a side ribcage, with a fourth tooth tattoo on the back of a hand that rests against the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three teeth on the ribs and a tooth on the hand

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three tooth tattoos sit in a diagonal row on the side of a bare torso, each drawn with a fine outline and light shading in the tooth roots and crowns. A fourth tooth is on the back of a hand that rests across the ribs, with a black nail and a ring visible. The photograph is in sepia tones, with the subject cropped at the shoulders and the hand in the lower foreground.

Fine line Ribs Hand Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Pip,

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I have buried eleven teeth under the rhubarb this spring, and the rhubarb has never looked so pleased with itself. You will think I have gone soft. The Cowley boy lost his second molar in the chip shop on Saturday and posted it to me in a matchbox with a note that said PLEASE GROW SOMETHING. So I did what Gran's ledger says: dug a hole the depth of a thumb knuckle and set the tooth in root first, the way you would plant a bulb.

You remember the three she kept in the tin on the dresser, the ones she called her rib-row because she liked to say they were the only parts of her that never gave her any trouble. I still have them. The fourth, the small one I carry in my palm when the bus is late, came out of her mouth the week before she died, and she made me promise to keep it somewhere it would see sunlight. So it lives in my coat pocket and I take it out at bus stops and turn it over until it warms.

This morning there was a green point pushing through the soil beside the rhubarb, pale as a fingernail and no thicker than a bootlace. By dinner it had split into a little crown, enamel the colour of old piano keys, rooted into the earth like it had always meant to be there. I left it alone. I did not tell the boy, because he would only want it back for a tooth fairy's coin, and I have decided the ground can keep a little of what it's given.

Come down at the weekend and bring the tin. I think Gran would like to see what the garden has done with her rib-row, and I want you to hold the new one before the frost gets it.

Love, Edie