Realistic tattoo on a side ribcage of skin tearing open to reveal blue sky and clouds, with black swallows in flight.

Torn skin revealing sky and swallows on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a rough tear in the skin revealing a blue sky with soft white and grey clouds beneath. Black and grey swallows fly across the torso and around the opening, with a few small dark marks scattered over the skin. The shading is smooth and painterly, with strong contrast between the warm skin tones and the cool blue sky.

Realism Ribs Sky Cloud Swallow Bird Torn skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plaster came away from the barn wall in February, the same week the frost cracked the water trough. You knew the swallows had gone south in October, when the mud nests under the eaves went quiet, but you kept finding feathers on the yard cobbles anyway, grey and forked, as though the birds had left something of themselves behind to prove they had meant to come back.

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Your grandmother used to say a wall was only a sky that hadn't been let out yet. You laughed at her then. Now you stand in the cold with a bar and a claw hammer, prising at the lime render where the damp had rotted through, and a piece the size of a dinner plate drops away at your feet. Behind it there is no brick, only blue, a streak of clear winter afternoon with cloud lying low over it like wool caught on a fence.

You don't tell anyone. The dog watches from the doorway with her head on one side. Over the next week you keep working, widening the gap until you can see the orchard beyond, bare and grey, and then on the Thursday three swallows come back through the hole. They are not quite real. They come out of the wall flat and black against the sky, and they bank once over the muck heap before turning east, in the wrong direction for any sane bird in February.

You sit on the upturned bucket until your fingers ache. Then you pick up the plaster, and very carefully you begin to fit it back.