Black and grey traditional tattoo covering a stomach, with a panther head, roses, a skull, a spider web and a pin-up head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional stomach piece with panther, roses and skull

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare midriff covered in a dense traditional design, with a panther head on one side, a pin-up head on the other, and roses at the top. A skull sits at the bottom, a spider web over the navel, and a snake or rope motif runs through the centre, with swirls and small stars filling the gaps. The bold black linework and solid black fills are set against the skin, with the shading in grey tones.

Traditional Other Panther Rose Skull Spider web Pin-up Snake Swirl Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Teodora had spent eleven years on the Halvard Reach, mending hull plates and keeping the ink stocked, and the old flash book was the only thing aboard nobody had ever asked her to throw out. Its pages had gone soft as cloth. She traced the panther with a gloved finger while the ring's night cycle dimmed the lamps to amber.

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The commission came from Oskar Lind, the dock foreman, who wanted his crew's sign on the aft bulkhead of the salvage tug Cormorant. "Something that says we bring things back," he said. She drew the sheet out in pencil: roses opening like shells across the top, a skull resting on the bottom edge, and in the middle a snake coiled round a spider's web, because the web was the sensor net they had strung across the debris field and the snake was the coolant line that fed it. Both had kept them alive for six seasons.

When the crew came to be inked, the needle hummed and the bulkhead ticked as the reactor cooled. Oskar asked why the pin-up had a face like his late sister's. Teodora said the face belonged to nobody, since flash never does. She shaded the stars last, tiny crosses scattered between the swirls, one for each wreck they had hauled home.

Three days later a proximity alarm sang out at the edge of the web. Oskar was already at the rail, laughing. A drifting cargo pod had snagged the net exactly where the snake ran through it, and the crew hauled it in by hand. Teodora looked at the wet black lines on the bulkhead and thought the old drawings had been telling the truth all along.