Abstract sketch-style tattoo of a woman's face with blue and purple brushstrokes on the upper arm.

Abstract woman portrait on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face in profile, partly hidden by a headscarf-like shape, is drawn in fine black linework with light shading on the upper arm. Loose vertical brushstrokes in purple and blue run beside the face, with thin geometric lines and a fan-like shape lower down the arm. The black ink is shaded in places, and the colour is limited to the purple and blue strokes against the pale skin.

Upper arm Woman Portrait Face Abstract Brushstroke Geometric line

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, out of the wind, and I'll tell you about the painter who came to Saltcombe the summer the herring went quiet. He had a wooden box of brushes and a voice like a cough in church, and he rented the room above Trewin's net loft for a pound a week. Every morning he went down the slipway with his box and came back with his cuffs stiff with blue.

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The purple he bought from a chandler in Plymouth who swore it came from the same shellfish the old kings wore. He painted the harbour wall the colour of bruised plums, then he painted a woman's face on it, half turned away, with a scarf wound over her hair like a sail being furled. Folk came to look. He finished her eyes in the first week and left the rest to the weather, and the weather is a bad artist but an honest one.

Ruth Pascoe, who mended nets beside him, said the woman had a mouth that wanted to say something to the sea. Each evening the tide came up under the wall and the blue strokes ran wet down the stone, and each morning there was a new line drawn past the face, thin as cotton thread, running out past the breakwater to where the Bright Lily lay at her mooring. Nobody saw him draw them. He said he only drew what the lines already wanted.

The Lily came home in October with empty nets, and her crew swore the sea had been full of folded lights, opening and closing like something breathing. When the painter's box washed up on the slipway that winter, every brush was worn to the ferrule. So when you walk the wall at high water, look at her face. If she's turned towards you, mind your manners, because she is still waiting on the man who gave her a face, and the Lily is still out there, pulling against her chain.