Black and grey outlined tattoo of two rows of teeth across the upper arm, shown with shading in the tooth forms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two rows of teeth on the upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two curved rows of individual teeth, with incisors, canines and molars drawn separately in outline. The linework is clean and even, with light grey shading inside each tooth to give some depth. The rows sit side by side across the upper arm, filling a band that follows the curve of the muscle.

Upper arm Teeth

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

Now don't look at me like that, I've told this at every wake in Harrowgate Row and nobody's ever once asked me to stop. Sit down by the range. Your tea's gone cold and I'll not warm it twice.

Keep reading

Old Tobias Pell had the only pair of pliers between Ashworth Pit and the chapel, and he kept a chart for them. Not a proper one, mind. A sheet of brown paper pinned inside the cupboard door, two rows drawn in pencil, top and bottom. Every tooth a man had lost to him had its place. Front ones first, then the eyeteeth, sharp as little dogs, then the grinders at the back, which took longest to come out. He shaded the empty spaces with his thumb so you could tell which were gone. Forty-one years of it. He used to say a miner's mouth was the one part of him the coal never got to finish, and then it did.

The winter the cage dropped at Ashworth, Dan Moss came up the lane with his jaw in two pieces and his lip split to the gum. Tobias set it with a strip of copper wire and a glass of rum, and when Dan reached for his purse, Tobias shook his head. He took the pencil off its string, drew one small tooth at the far end of his own row, and then rubbed it out and drew it again, slower. That was his payment, he said. He'd keep one place on the chart for himself, and it would be the last one shaded.

They found him in March, in his chair, with the range gone out. The sheet was still pinned behind the door. Both rows were full and every gap was shaded in, and his own name was written small at the bottom, with nothing beside it. Count them if you like. I did, and I'm the only one left who can still read his writing.