Sketch-style tattoo on the outer thigh showing a bearded face built from a house with windows, holding a pipe and a hand with yellow and blue wash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bearded face made of a house on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A sketchy tattoo of a bearded face formed from the outline of a house with two windows and a gabled roof, with a pipe curling from the moustache area down to a hand holding a small object. The linework is grey and loose, with cross-hatched shading in the beard and wash-like patches of yellow and turquoise behind the design. The tattoo fills the thigh, shown in a close, front-on photograph against a plain pale background.

Thigh Face House Moustache Pipe Hand Beard

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the ward knew where the old man came from, only that he arrived at the side door at ten past two, while the lift to the fourth floor stuck between floors and the night porter, Dilys Parry, went to fetch the spare keys. He had a house for a head. Two windows looked out from under his brow, a slate roof sat on his crown, and a clay pipe smoked from somewhere beneath a moustache as thick as a hedge. In his palm he cupped a small shell the colour of marmalade, the way you would carry a moth you meant to let go.

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He asked for Bed Nine, Mrs Owen, who had been on the ward since March and had stopped asking for anyone. Dilys told him visiting ended at eight. He said he had only come to see the fire was lit, and he looked at the radiator as if it had disappointed him. Dilys has said since that she should have called the sister. She did not. She walked him down the corridor under the buzzing strip lights, and the smoke from his pipe hung in the air behind him in long yellow ribbons that did not drift toward the fire doors.

He sat on the plastic chair and placed the shell in Mrs Owen's hand, folding her fingers over it with his own. Her breathing, which had been catching all week like a gate in the wind, slowed and then steadied. The smoke went out through a window that had been painted shut since before the new wing was built. Dilys noticed a lamp was burning in each of the two windows of his head.

At six, when the day staff came on, Mrs Owen was asleep with colour in her cheeks. The chair was empty. There was only the shell on the blanket and a faint smell of tobacco and wet timber. Dilys wrote the time in the night book, 2.10, door propped, and under it, because it seemed the honest thing, the name of the empty house on Glanrhyd Road where the carers said a light had been seen in the upstairs window.