Black and grey realism tattoo on an arm, shaped like torn skin peeling back to reveal Latin text across the upper arm and elbow.

Torn skin revealing Latin text on arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded realism tattoo on an upper arm and elbow shows skin peeling back in ragged strips to reveal printed-looking Latin text beneath. The shading gives the torn edges, folds and raised flesh a three-dimensional look, while the text is rendered in fine dark lettering. The image is shot close up on the arm against a plain wall, with the shoulder and torso partly visible.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Torn skin Latin text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mistress Edith had been scraping the calfskin for three days before the vellum began to speak back. Under the pumice the ink of an older hand came up grey and ragged, a psalm half-erased to make room for someone's accounts of wool and barley. She was paid by the leaf and had a daughter to feed, so she kept her knife moving and tried not to read.

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But the lines kept catching her eye. Quia ego sum, they said, and then a word had been rubbed to a smudge, and then a tear where the parchment had split along the grain and peeled back like a sleeve. Along the tear the new ink of the accounts ran across the old, so every figure seemed to be climbing out of a wound in the text.

On the last evening she laid the leaf on the bench beside the lamp and found a line scratched out beneath the barley prices: a name, and a date in the year her own mother had been born. Someone a century gone had cut the old page open at the spine to make it write again, and had written over the cut. She sat with that for a long while. Then she took a fresh quill and, instead of scraping, copied the old psalm carefully into the margin, every letter, so that whoever scraped her work next would have to choose which voice to keep.