Black and grey torn skin effect tattoo on an upper arm, with lines of lettering revealed beneath the skin.

Torn skin lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several lines of lettering set inside a torn opening in the skin, with shaded flaps that give a three dimensional effect. The ink is black and grey, with soft grey shading on the torn edges and the surrounding tissue. The design fills the upper arm in a close crop against plain grey fabric.

Lettering Realism Upper arm Lettering Text Torn skin Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The storm took the old elm at the bottom of Mrs Latimer's allotment plot on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I had the chainsaw out and the trunk split open down its length like a fish. Nobody had warned me there would be writing inside. Lines ran under the bark, dark where the wood had gone to heartwood, pressed in by a hand that had never bothered about spacing.

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Dad would have said leave it. He had a rule about things growing over what they had been given, and the elm had grown over a great deal. But I worked the splinters out with a penknife and read by torchlight, and each sentence broke off at the edge of the grain, so every line had to be finished from the one below it, like a rope passed hand to hand up a wall.

It was a warning, or a promise, or both, and it had been carved by someone who expected the tree to outlast them. I could not tell which of the two of them had been brave. Mrs Latimer said she had never seen the tree before she bought the plot, which meant either the wood had been cut and hidden by a previous tenant or the words had grown in the trunk over decades, the way a scar closes around a nail.

I stood the sound half upright against the gate where the sun would catch it. By September the rain had darkened the letters until only someone standing close could read them, and I was the only one who ever came that close.