It was an image that was extremely difficult to look at, and ultimately the finger injury suffered by Kevin McHugh is what has led him to retire from football at 36.
The now former Finn Harps player could not get his finger repaired after a freak accident last week.
Speaking to Richie McCormack, Daniel Kelly and Oisin Langan on Newstalk's Airtricity League Podcast, McHugh detailed how the gruesome injury occurred.
"You can call it freakish alright. It was this time last week. I was coaching at a wee soccer academy that I run and basically was going to get another goal from over the fence and my ring got caught and obviously the rest is history. The finger completely came off. It just happened in a split second," he explained.
The former forward, who represented Finn Harps across two spells from 1998 to last week, with three years at Derry City and Linfield in between, managed to quickly drive himself to hospital.
Listen to the full interview on the podcast player below or on iTunes:
As for the current condition of his hand, it was not possible to restore the finger back onto his hand.
"I was quite hopeful that they would be able to re-attach the finger because they got the finger up from the pitch to the hospital in good time and they got it on ice and they were able to take care of it. So I thought there would be no problem re-attaching it but the bit of bone you would see in the picture I tweeted, that actually came up from my knuckle. I only found this out on Thursday morning so obviously the whole finger was gone and there's a lot of tendons, nerves and things severed by the ring. So they explained to me there was nothing they could do for me. So that was hard to take on Thursday morning," he said.
"That was probably the biggest disappointment, never mind the pain of it. Just the biggest disappointment was knowing that you were going to be left with no finger."
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