Two views of a forearm tattoo showing red scales beneath black, torn-open skin edges, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Torn skin with red scales on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows red scales peeking through ragged black tears, as if the skin has been split open. The scales are built from fine black outlines and cross-hatched scale texture, with the torn edges in solid black and light shading. Two angles of the same forearm are shown side by side against a dark background.

Forearm Torn skin Scale Reptile Tear

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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 sycamore came down in February, and by April the bed beneath it had gone to nettles and a population of fat grey slugs you have stopped counting. You are kneeling in the wet with a hand fork when the soil gives up something pale: a sheet of skin, long as your forearm, split down its length like a glove pulled off in a hurry. The edges are ragged. When you lift it to the light, something is still printed in it, overlapping scales the colour of rhubarb stalks.

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Your neighbour Mrs Okonedo, who has kept bees for forty years and believes only in what fits in a jar, says it is a fox's doing, or a badger's. But badgers do not leave scales. You fold the skin into a carrier bag and carry it up the path, and the kitchen smells of cold tea while the radio says the river is high. Behind you the bed is quiet in a way it was not before.

That night you lay the skin on the windowsill. By morning it has stiffened, and the scales have darkened at their rims like embers. The tears have lengthened. Something beneath has been moving, pressing outward the way a seedling pushes through a split husk.

You go out before breakfast with the trowel. Under the sycamore the soil has been turned in a long furrow, and at its end, coiled in the hollow where the roots lifted, is something red and patient, watching you with a gaze as clear as rainwater. You set the trowel down. You do not run. You say good morning, the way your grandmother taught you to greet anything that might be bigger than you, and it lifts its head to look at the sky.