Black ink tattoo of a sketchy, abstract face on the forearm of a person in a white top.

Abstract face tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black ink tattoo shows a loose, sketchy face drawn with broken, overlapping lines, with exaggerated eyes, nose and mouth. The linework is scratchy and varied in weight, with soft grey shading around the features. The design sits centrally on a pale forearm against a plain white background, with a floral-patterned hem visible at the lower left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi had drawn the ferry queue every morning for eleven years, and every morning the faces came out wrong. She sat on the harbour wall at Skerrow with a stub of charcoal and a cheap pad, and she never lifted the pencil once it touched the paper. Her uncle said that was why the drawings looked like they were trying to get away. The eyes went wide where the real eyes had been narrow with worry. The noses slid sideways to make room for a joke nobody had told.

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Then the Dunmore boy came back from the mainland with a tin of ink and a bad idea about tattooing his own mother. Mairi told him no. She told him the lines were the problem, that a face needed to be stopped somewhere. He drew one anyway on the back of a fish crate, a loose oval with the nose hooked down like a question, and he pressed so hard the paper tore.

Mairi kept the torn sheet. On Tuesday the boat was late, and the queue thickened into a crowd of coats and bags. She pulled out the pad and let her hand go without thinking, the way the sea goes without asking the tide. When she looked down, the faces were looking back at her, each one a little more uncertain than the last, and for once she didn't want to fix them.

The last ferry came in with the lamps already lit. Mairi was still on the wall, drawing the man who stepped off with his hands in his pockets, his features scribbled and doubled, one eye turned toward the harbour and one toward home. She signed the corner of the page with her initials and a small hook, the way the Dunmore boy had signed his crate.

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