Black line tattoo of a woman with long flowing hair and a hand raised near her chin, in a fine line style, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art Nouveau style woman on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line outline of a woman with her hair swept up and long strands flowing down and curling at the base of the design. The linework is black and even in weight, with little shading, and the drawing is stylised with elongated curves. The tattoo sits on the inner forearm against a plain skin tone, with studio bottles visible in the background.

Fine line Forearm Woman Portrait Hand Figure

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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

The lacquer had gone tacky in the heat, and Marguerite kept wiping her fingers on the rag tucked into her apron while the ferrotype of her mother hung crooked above the bench. The commission was for a bookbinder in Ledbury who wanted a woman drawn in one unbroken line, the way old posters did it, her hair lifted off her neck and left to run loose down the page. Marguerite had never managed a line that stayed unbroken. Her hand lifted at every turn of the pen.

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The bookbinder's wife came in on the Thursday with a pencil sketch from a magazine and a shawl she said had belonged to a cousin in Lyon. She sat by the window and let the light pour over her wrist while Marguerite worked. Her hair was pinned high and two strands had escaped and curled at the nape like they were listening for something. Marguerite drew them without lifting the pen, following the curl down and round until it came to rest beside her own pulse.

When the woman left, the drawing lay on the bench, and Marguerite saw what she had done. The hair had become a river that spilled out of the frame and turned back on itself at the bottom, and the face had gone calm and far away, as if it had heard its name called from another room. She pressed the rag against the ink to see whether it would smudge. It didn't. The line had held the whole way round, and she had never once taken the pen off the paper.

She pinned the sheet above the bench beside her mother's photograph and left it there until the lacquer dried.