Black and grey realism tattoo of a face formed from a folded hundred dollar bill, with a cigar and smoke, on skin.

Banknote face with cigar

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A face emerges from a folded US hundred dollar banknote, with the note's serial numbers and the 100 denomination still visible around the edges. The face has smooth shading, heavy black outlines and a cigar clenched between the teeth, with a curl of smoke rising at the right. The image is in black and grey with strong contrast against the surrounding skin.

Realism Other Banknote Face Smoke

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

Eva found the face on the Tuesday, when the hundred dollar note had been folded so many times that its creases had decided a shape of their own. She was at the back table of her uncle's pawnshop on Cheapside, pressing the note flat under a biscuit tin, and the crease across the top had become a brow, the serial number had curled into a jaw, and a grin had come out of the paper like someone clearing their throat.

Keep reading

Uncle Ray said it was luck, the kind that paid out in cigars. He kept a box of Cubans from a man in Tangier and lit one whenever a deal went sour, which lately was every deal. He had won the note off a travelling salesman at the Crown in Margate, a man who'd bragged about American money as if it made him American too. "A face on money is a warning," Ray said through a cloud of smoke. "Somebody always pays for the portrait." Eva didn't ask him who he meant. She had learned that from him.

That night she unfolded the note at her kitchen table and tried to make the face go away. She flattened it with the heel of her hand, ironed it with a tea towel, and slid it under the fridge magnet from Skegness. By morning the grin was back, pressed even harder into the paper, and the smell of a Cuban hung over the whole flat. She took the note to the seafront, where the wind was loud enough to drown out thinking, and let go of it. It caught on the railings, turned once like a small pale fish, and flew out over the sand towards the pier. Eva watched it go and felt, for the first time in weeks, that the debt had been paid by somebody else.