Large back tattoo in black and grey with red accents, showing lips holding a cigarette, a hand, and German lettering across the back.

Back piece with lips, hand and German lettering

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a female figure's lips with a cigarette held by a hand, drawn in black and grey with loose, sketchy shading. German words run across the shoulder and down the spine, with a line of text on the lower left and a red heart on the right shoulder. The composition fills the whole back with overlapping painterly brushstrokes and fading edges.

Realism Back Lip Cigarette Hand Heart Lettering Brushstroke Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Shaft Four had stuck three hundred metres down since Tuesday, so the whole row smelled of wet coal and nobody talked about anything but the price of bread. I was the only person in Hallenberg paid to handle ink. Herr Dorn kept his press above the chemist's, and he let me set type for the Sunday notices because my hand was steady and my capitals did not wander.

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That was the week Kaspar Vollmer came up from Essen with a crate of brushes and a cough he would not discuss. He wanted a poster for a travelling show. He smoked constantly, the cigarette low in the corner of his mouth, and he dipped his brush in soot and dragged it across the paper until a face rose out of the grey like something surfacing from a pond. Beneath the mouth I set a line from Schiller, Die Kunst ist eine Tochter der Freiheit, and across the top, Sachliche Romanze.

When I asked what it meant, he shrugged. 'A romance with the facts left in. Nobody here needs the other kind.'

On the last evening the lift came back to life and the shift horns sounded across the valley. Vollmer painted a small red heart in the bottom corner of the proof, quick and careless. Dorn said it would cost us the contract. Vollmer said it was for the nurse who had stitched his hand after the fall. I pulled the first sheet myself. The red sat a little thick over the heart, and the mouth had smudged where I touched the wet ink with my thumb. I left it. I thought the smudge made the face look as if it were about to say something true.