Realistic colour tattoo on a side torso made to look like torn skin, revealing a blue sky with clouds and black swallows in flight across the ribs.

Torn skin revealing sky and swallows on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows torn, cracked skin opening onto a blue sky with soft white clouds, with several dark swallows flying across the ribs and side of the torso. The skin edges are shaded in grey and brown to suggest depth, and the birds are rendered in black with soft shading. The composition wraps around the curve of the body, with the sky panel centred and the birds spread across the upper and lower areas.

Realism Ribs Sky Cloud Swallow Bird Torn skin Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wall came apart on the third Thursday of the autumn market, in the middle of the rain, and the first to see it was Ada Pringle, who was selling eggs from a trestle under the arcade. She heard a sound like a dropped plate, then a long tearing, and when she looked up the old limewashed wall of the tannery had split from its footing to the gutter. Through the crack was blue. It was not grey rain-light but a summer afternoon, with clouds lying in it like sheep.

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Nobody could agree what to do. Councillor Fenn wanted it boarded. Hobb Greaves, who had mended that wall every spring for forty years, only pulled his cap down and said the plaster had been crying out for a long while. He went up his ladder with a trowel and a bucket of lime, and stopped halfway, because the swallows had started to come out of the gap. They came one at a time, then in a bunch, black-backed and forked-tailed, and they went over the market roofs as though they had been shut in a long time and were angry about it.

Where they flew, the rain stopped. Ada swore to this. The awnings dried in a line across the square, and the shoppers stood in the sunlight with their collars up, blinking. Hobb's granddaughter Rosa, a girl of nine who wore her boots on the wrong feet, slipped through the gap before anyone could catch her. She came back out with mud to her knees and said the sky went on a long way, and there was nothing behind it but more sky and a single tree.

Hobb did not mend the wall. He left the crack open, propped it with two oak beams, and every morning he set a saucer of milk on the step below it. By the next autumn the swallows had built their nests along the lintel, and the market moved its stalls a yard to the left so the birds could come and go. People still bought their eggs in the rain. They just looked up first.