Black and grey tattoo of a rolled 100 banknote with a shaded face on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Banknote face portrait on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo shows a 100 banknote with a shaded human face across its centre, with the bill curling over the top of the design. The linework is fine and sketchy, with soft grey shading on the face and the paper, and the bill's serial number and 100 denominations are visible. The image is entirely black and grey and is framed closely on the upper arm.

Upper arm Banknote Money Face Portrait

Find an artist for this

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 paper had to be right before the face could go on it. Ada Lusk soaked cotton rag in cold tea for three nights, pressed it under a flat iron until it went soft as an old glove, then crumpled it in her fist so it would fold the way real money folds. Her uncle had taught her that much before the cough took him. He never taught her the face.

Keep reading

The face belonged to Mr Harwood, who had sold her father a lame grey mare with a bad hoof and a fine coat painted over the wound. She drew him from memory at the back of the shop, the heavy lids, the mouth pulled down at one corner as if he had tasted something sour and was too polite to spit it out. Across the top she laid the bill's old green wash in soft grey, and along the left edge she wrote the serial number in her careful copperplate, AH 3107, then H88, the figures her uncle used to call the only honest thing about a note.

On Thursday she rolled the bill tight and bought a loaf with it. The baker held it to the window, turned it over, and looked at her for a long moment. Who's the gentleman, he asked. Nobody you'd know, said Ada. He gave her change in coin, two shillings and a penny, and she thought that was the end of it until she saw Mr Harwood at the corn exchange the next morning, rubbing his thumb along a curl of paper in his own waistcoat pocket and frowning at it as though he could not quite place the face.

That night she set the bill on the kitchen table beside her uncle's biscuit tin, lifted the lid, and laid the note inside with the face turned up, so that whoever opened the tin next would have to look at him first.