Skip to content

Mood · mood_ominous

Ominous

A register of impending harm that is SUGGESTED rather than shown. Enriched from the T11.6 SPLIT-DERIVED seed. THE HONEST STATE OF THIS ROW FIRST: the word ominous occurs on ZERO of the roughly 130 pages saved for this batch. The label is inherited from the repo's fused horror-realism style value and from the vendored pack's own mood_ominous row, not from a fetched source, and nothing here changes that. What a Tier 1 source does supply is the DISTINCTION the register turns on, drawn for Gothic fiction rather than for tattooing: “Terror for Radcliffe is concerned with the psychological experience of being full of fear and dread and thus of recognising human limits; horror by contrast focuses on the horrific object or event itself” and, of terror, “It does not show horrific things explicitly but only suggests them.” Reading that distinction onto tattoo imagery is MY INFERENCE and is marked as such. theme_horror is the subject matter; this is the register, and the corpus needs both because a piece can be ominous without a single horror motif in it.
Attested
Low confidencedraft

1 attested · 1 promoted2 sources · T1

What the research says

mood
Category
threatening
Keywords
ominous; foreboding; threatening; sense of dread
Visual traits
implication rather than depiction; the threatening element withheld or partly hidden
Conflicts or cautions
DISTINCT FROM theme_horror, which is what the piece is ABOUT. Also distinct from mood_dread, which names the felt state rather than the quality of the image. UNDER-SOURCED BY CONSTRUCTION and shipped that way on purpose: no fetched source uses this word, and the one source that defines the register is about eighteenth-century fiction. A reviewer may reasonably merge it into mood_dread or retire it.

Provenance

2 resolved

  • Gothic motifs (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    John Bowen, The British Library

    British Library Discovering Literature article by Professor John Bowen. Verbatim: Gothic characters "find themselves in a strange place; somewhere other, different, mysterious"; the mode reaches for "the sublime, to shock us out of the limits of our everyday lives with the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation". Fetched from the British Library's .cn mirror because bl.uk paths for this article did not resolve during this task.

    cultural institution · retrieved 2026-08-28

  • vibe-ink-flow frontend/src/data/stylePreviewData.ts (in-repo style vocabulary)

    Tier 3

    VIBE TATTOOS (this repository)

    NOT A WEB SOURCE - read in-repo on 2026-08-28, not fetched. The file names 19 style labels including realism-black-gray, realism-full-color, horror-realism, nightmare-realism and photorealistic as sibling entries. It establishes only that these labels exist in this codebase, not that they name distinct styles. Cited by the split-derived theme, mood and palette nodes created to decompose the fused labels per IMPLEMENTATION_NOTE section 5.

    internal expert · retrieved 2026-08-28

Related concepts

2 links

Associated with · 2

  • ← incomingRealismStyleAttested
    strength 0.50draft

    Emotional-register axis extracted from the repo's fused 'horror-realism' style label.

  • ← incomingHorrorThemeAttested
    strength 0.50promoted · not an independent attestationresearched

    Promoted from themes_seed.moods of theme_horror ('ominous'). Provenance inherited from the parent row(s): source_tattoolife_dark_horror; source_tattoolife_macabre_grotesque; source_repo_style_preview_data; the first is carried in source_id. No new fact: this edge restates a value already present in the corpus. STRENGTH 0.5 set by the T11.11c rule: this pairing is asserted by ONE parent row's association column and by no second row; the pack's scale reads 0.5 as 'context-dependent'. Inputs are corpus counts only - no source count, tier or confidence is used.