Black and grey realism tattoo on a man's upper arm and elbow, showing torn skin peeled back to reveal printed Latin-style text beneath.

Torn skin revealing text on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man's arm shows a tattoo that imitates skin ripped open to expose printed pages of small, dense text beneath. The linework and shading are fine and detailed, with lifted edges, folds and highlights that create a three-dimensional effect. The image is in black and grey, and the composition is close-up, cropped below the shoulder and above the wrist.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Torn skin Text Latin text Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mistress Hale never allowed the press to be unpacked below the waterline, so the Gloriana's printing house sat in the cramped lamp room aft, where the damp made the ink run like tar. Corwen had been set to the case for three months by then, and he knew the Latin better than the chaplain did, because he had spent every night of the crossing reading the sheets he composed upside down and backwards.

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The book was a Psalter for the mission at Port Ellery, four hundred leaves, and the captain wanted it finished before the Cape. Corwen set the lines letter by letter from the reversed type, his fingers grey to the knuckle. Anima, he would mutter. Anima mea. Each sheet came off the platen warm and wet, and he hung them on lines strung between the beams like washing, so that the whole lamp room seemed to be sleeping under a field of pale ghosts.

When the storm came off the Horn, a sea broke through the hatch and drowned the lower forme. Corwen went down after the type with a knife between his teeth and came up with a leaf that had torn across its middle, the paper curled back like bark. He held it to the lantern and saw that the words beneath the rip were not the psalm at all. They were the same lines, reprinted over and over, right down to the margin, as if the press had been trying to say one thing into every sheet it had ever pulled.

He never told the captain. He folded the torn leaf into his coat, and when they reached Port Ellery he set the psalm again, this time with his own name at the foot, so that somebody, one day, would have to lift the page to read it.