Realism tattoo on an upper arm and elbow showing torn skin that reveals Latin text and a parchment-like layer beneath.

Torn skin revealing Latin text on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a shirtless man's arm with the skin appearing torn open along a ragged edge, exposing printed Latin text beneath. The linework and shading are highly detailed, with soft grey gradients giving the torn skin and paper edges a three-dimensional look. The ink is almost entirely black and grey, with muted skin tones around the tears, and the design wraps across the upper arm and elbow.

Realism Upper arm Torn skin Latin text Text

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

The vellum came away from the board the way a scab does when it is ready, all at once and with a small wet sound that made Hester wince. Under the cracked leather spine, where damp had crept in forty years ago, the cover had split along the sewing, and beneath it lay a sheet the colour of weak tea, written edge to edge in a hand so cramped it looked like frost forming on glass.

Keep reading

She had been hired to clean the binding and return it to the Lendrick estate, not to read it. The letters she could make out were Latin, pale as dust, and she read them the way she read everything in the back room under the single lamp, slowly, lips moving. Gladius. Sanguis. Then a phrase repeated down the margin, sit tibi nomen, over and over, as if someone had been practising a signature they were not yet allowed to make.

Her blade had caught on the one line that mattered. Beneath the torn flap was an older layer, the skin scraped and reused, and the ink of the first text bled up through the second like a bruise under a thumb. She held the magnifier to it until the words sharpened: a list of names, a sum in pennies beside each, and beside the last name, in a different hand, the single word redditum, returned.

She wrote to the estate that the binding could be saved but the book would need to stay a while longer. Then she mixed oak gall ink the way the old scribes had, took a fine brush, and beneath the last name on the list she wrote her own, in the same cramped hand, and let it dry before she closed the board.