Torn skin revealing virtue words on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows skin peeled back in ragged, lifted flaps to reveal heart-shaped stone panels carved with English words, including prosperity, truth, family, friendship, freedom, integrity, compassion and courage. Shading gives the torn edges and stone surface a rounded, three-dimensional look. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the forearm in a tightly framed close-up against a dark background.

Realism Lettering Forearm Torn skin Word Stone Heart Lettering

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 seam gave out in the wet spring of the year the chapel roof fell in, and Idris Vaughan was the one who put his pick through the grey wall at the bottom of the north level. The rock did not crack the way rock should. It lifted and curled back in ragged flaps, like bark off a dead birch, and underneath lay three stones shaped like hearts, each as broad as a Bible and as smooth as a churn lid.

Keep reading

Words were cut into them, the kind the minister read out on Sundays and never once explained: PROSPERITY, TRUTH, FAMILY, FRIENDSHIP, FREEDOM, COURAGE. Idris could read well enough, for the pit school had taught him. He stood with his lamp hissing and spelled them out loud, and the men behind him went quiet, the way men do when a thing is bigger than their wages.

Nobody agreed what to do. Old Mrs Gwen Pritchard said the stones belonged to whoever had the nerve to lift them, and Idris had the nerve, so they were his. The overman said they belonged to the company. They argued through a month of wet shifts, until the seam flooded and the north level was boarded shut and the hearts stayed where they lay.

On the last Sunday of that month Idris went down alone with a candle and sat with his back to the timber. He read the words again until the wax ran low. When he came up the drift, his hands were empty and his face was wet, though the shaft was dry. The next week the men began carrying the stones up, one at a time, on a handcart borrowed from the chapel. They set each one in the chapel wall beside the door, where anyone going in or out would have to pass them, and no one ever argued about it again.