Neo-trad style tattoo of an anatomical face in black and grey hatching with a green, yellow and red band across the jaw, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical face with colour band on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised anatomical face is drawn in bold black outline, with its musculature shown in black and grey hatching and stippling and the lips left as bare skin. A band of green, yellow and red colour runs across the lower face and neck, contrasting with the greyscale shading. The design is centred on a pale forearm against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate was due at the printers on Friday and the muscles were already right. Ada had hatched every fibre of the temporal and masseter with a steel nib until her wrist ached, and the face on the board looked less like a textbook diagram than a man listening for footsteps on the stair. Only the mouth was unfinished. She had left the lips as bare board, and the proofs that came back from Leeds carried a pencilled query in the margin: deliberate?

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Mr Hollis, who had paid for the atlas and wanted it to sell on the railway bookstalls, sent a boy round with a tin of gouache and an instruction. Put some colour on him, something for the eye to rest on. Ada carried the tin up to the drawing room at dusk, dipped a brush, and laid a band across the jaw and down the throat: green, then yellow, then red, worn the way a sash is worn over a uniform. It sat over the muscle like a good bandage over a wound that had healed clean.

When the boy came for the board, she had still not touched the lips. She told him the printer would need them left clean for the register. That was a lie, and she suspected he knew it. Nobody at Hollis and Sons ever asked her why the mouth should be the only white thing on the page, and she did not tell them that her mother had gone quiet in her last winter and kept her lips pressed shut so nothing would be said that could not be taken back.

The press took the plate on Monday morning. Ada watched the first sheet come off warm and damp, the black hatching dense as a winter hedge, the colour bright at the edge, and at the centre of it all two lips the paper had kept for itself.

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