Colour tattoo of torn skin revealing rainbow stripes in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Torn skin revealing rainbow stripes on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows skin peeled back in ragged, torn edges, revealing horizontal bands of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple beneath. The edges are shaded to look raised and three-dimensional, with highlights on the lifted skin and soft shadows inside the tear. The bright, saturated colour fills the whole design against the natural skin tone, and the composition runs diagonally down the side of the torso.

Realism Ribs Rainbow Torn skin Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lime wash came away from the north wall of the refectory in a single sheet on Tuesday, and I stood there with my scraper held out like a fool, because under the grey there was colour. Not a faded saint or a ribbon of gold leaf, but stripes: red, then orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, laid down in bands as wide as my forearm and running clean across the plaster as if someone had torn the wall open to show what it was made of.

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Sister Agnes lent me the house ledger from the archive in Durham. It records that the room was limewashed in 1957 on the instruction of a visitor from the diocese, who found the decoration unseemly for a house of silence. Nobody wrote down who painted the stripes. The dyers' sample books in the parish box have the same reds and greens, mixed from madder and woad, and one page is scorched along its edge where someone once held it too near a candle.

I spent three weeks with a scalpel, a tin of ammonia and a brush no thicker than a hair, lifting the grey from the ragged margins so the paint beneath curled up like the lip of a torn page. Each evening the gulls worked the cliffs below the window and the light went amber, then green, then blue, the same order I was uncovering.

On the last afternoon I found a line scratched into the plaster under the violet, in a hand that pressed hard: they can whitewash the weather but not the sea. I photographed it for the report and did not mention it to the diocese. I left one edge unfinished on purpose, a ragged lip where the grey stops, so anyone coming in from the cold can see the colours have been there all along.