Colour tattoo of a winter lake with dark pine trees and a purple sky, revealed through torn skin on the side of the ribs, with blue snowflakes around it.

Winter lake and pines in torn skin on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A winter lake scene with dark pine silhouettes, a pale purple and orange sky and reflections in blue water sits within a ripped-skin opening. Soft shading and smooth blending give the water and sky depth, while the trees are drawn in solid black. Small blue snowflakes are scattered around the tear, and the palette is mainly blue, purple and black on pale skin.

Ribs Lake Pine tree Snowflake Sky Reflection Winter Torn skin Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crack in the back bedroom wall opened on the second night of January, the way the ice on the lake below the lodge always cracked, with a sound like a rifle fired a long way off. Dad had boarded that room up before he died, but the damp had got into the boards, and by morning the plaster had split in a jagged seam from skirting to cornice. Through it I could see pines. Black ones, standing in snow, and beyond them a lake the colour of a bruise going pale at the edges, with a sky above it streaked purple and orange.

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I took the torch up on Thursday and put my palm flat against the gap. The air coming through was cold and smelled of resin and wet stone. Snowflakes were drifting in, the small blue sort Gran used to cut from paper for the windows, and they landed on my knuckles and did not melt. Gran had a rule about windows that showed weather: you do not put your hand through them. I put my hand through anyway. The water on the other side was still, and when I touched it, the reflected trees shivered as though something had stirred underneath.

On the shore there were small footprints leading to the wall, and I understood they were not mine. I did not follow them. I took a carpenter's pencil and wrote the date on the plaster beside the seam, the way Dad used to mark the height of the snow. By the next morning the crack had closed to a hairline, and the pencil mark had gone. But when I looked through the wallpaper's thin place by the window, there was my handwriting on the far side of the lake, scratched into a birch trunk, with next year's date beneath it.