A recent photo of a giant piece of artwork hung on the wall of a hostel became the subject of widespread discussion on Twitter over the weekend, as the site’s brightest minds came together to try and figure out what the hell they were looking at.



The original poster thought the image looked like heterosexual penetration, which would be an incredibly unorthodox choice of wall decor. The image shows what looks like human skin and either a thumb or a penis pressing into what could be another person. It’s easy to see how at first glance, you’d look at it and think sex, but upon closer inspection, nothing about it being sex makes very much sense at all.



Whatever it was, everyone agreed that somebody needed to get to the bottom of this — better yet, the hostel needed to release a statement. On that latter count, someone did in fact reach out to St. Christopher’s Inn in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. They responded via email and said, “We are not entirely sure where the art comes from. According to my manager, some of the art in the hostel comes from Dutch students, but the real backstory stays unclear.”


That explains it then: It’s the work of perverted Dutch art students. Case closed!


Except not really, because we still don’t know exactly what it is we’re looking at. While many were happy to accept that it was penetrative sex, others argued that it was a thumb kneading dough, which just unlocked an entirely new series of questions about why and how somebody’s thumb would look like it’s being vacuumed into the dough.




Another Twitter user, who allegedly spent two days having arguments on Discord about the image, was convinced it was a stretched out pubis with a little bit of shaft visible in between some thighs. They cited other explicit artworks found in the hostel to shore up their argument, and, indeed, the hostel appears to have images featuring naked bodies hanging on the walls. This is Amsterdam’s Red Light District — what else do you expect?


Short of the photographer themselves coming forward, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for certain what exactly the image is depicting. Maybe that was the goal: It’s more interesting to leave interpreting art up to the viewer, after all, rather than holding their hand and guiding them through the process.


But if it is someone’s thumb — or penis — many people have many questions about anatomy they’d love to ask. So fingers — or thumbs, or penises — crossed that someone does come forward to put this mystery to bed once and for all.