Colour tattoo on the side of a ribcage that looks like torn skin, revealing a dark red giant face with a blue eye and gritted teeth.

Torn skin revealing a giant face on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a dark red-brown giant face with a single blue eye and a row of grey teeth, set inside a ragged opening that appears to tear through the skin. The linework is bold, with heavy shading on the face and rough, textured edges around the tear. The red and blue ink stands out against the lighter skin, and the tattoo fills most of the side of the ribcage in the frame.

Ribs Torn skin Blue eye Teeth

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's fine, and mind the goats, they've no manners. You want the tale of the Ash Road? Then hush. Forty years back the surveyors came out from the coast with their theodolites and long chains, wanting a line through the Sayed flats as straight as a knife cut. Old Hamid at the well told them the ground was not ground. He said it was the hide of something that had lain down a long time ago and grown tired of lying.

Keep reading

They laughed at him. A straight road needs no permission, the foreman said, and they laid the tar in a week. On the ninth morning the sand split along the centreline with a sound like a sheet tearing on a washing line. Out of the crack came a slope of red-brown hide, ribbed like old leather, and then, very slowly, a face the size of the water tower in Qasr. One eye opened in it, blue as the sky over the coast, and it looked down the length of the new road the way a man looks at a stranger's dog.

Then it smiled. Grey teeth, one after another, each as long as a lorry. The foreman ran. Hamid didn't. He sat on his upturned bucket and said, "Now you know why the road was crooked." The men who stayed say the thing only ever opened its mouth to breathe, and that every wind from the east carries a little of its breath, which is why the dunes move the wrong way.

So when you drive the Ash Road at night and the tar seems to ripple, don't stop, and don't look at the sand's edge. Keep your headlights on the white line. It's only the old skin settling, and it has never yet taken a car that stayed on the line.