‘The Vampire Diaries’ season 6 spoilers: See first photo of Ian Somerhalder’s Damon

What lies ahead for Damon Salvatore on “The Vampire Diaries” season 6? We’re still waiting for some of the finer details to come out, but the first photo of Ian Somerhalder’s character is certainly … bloody.

We’ve just got a chance to see a first-look photo of Damon, and it comes courtesy of Ian’s official Instagram page. You can see his fangs, and a pretty copious amount of blood running down his neck. It’s a pretty grisly picture, even for this show; while vampires are a common theme here, this has never been the same sort of extremely-violent show that we have over on HBO’s “True Blood.”

So what does this photo really mean? Maybe this could be seen as a sign that Damon is going to find his way back to Mystic Falls / Whitmore College sooner rather than later. As far as we know, though, the story is going to begin this coming season with the character off in some unknown world with Bonnie (Kat Graham) after the two failed to make it back from the other side. It was a particularly emotional end to the season, and it has us very much intrigued by what is going to be coming up next.

At some point, though, we do assume that Damon is going to manage to find his way back to the world of the familiar. After all, this would not be “The Vampire Diaries” without seeing a whole lot of the familiar characters and faces together again.

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Photo: The CW