Black and grey realism portrait tattoo of a bearded man in a high collar, shaded on the upper arm.

Bearded man portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey portrait of a bearded man with wavy hair, shown from the chest up in a three-quarter view. The face is built from fine stippled shading and soft blended tones, with detailed linework in the hair, beard and collar. The tattoo sits on the outer upper arm, with a partly visible dark shaded design at the top edge of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Portrait Man Beard Hair Collar Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lamp higher, Ada, or I'll be stippling the wrong man. Tobias Wren had painted faces on the back wall of the Cutter's Well post office for thirty winters, and the road sent him more work than the town could pay for. Dust crept under the door each morning and settled on wet ink, so he worked with a damp cloth over his left hand and a single sable hair in his right.

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The widow Marlow brought him a photograph folded inside a flour sack. Her husband had driven a freight wagon south to the salt flats and never come back with the others. "He had a beard like a hedge," she said, "and his hair never lay down. He wore his good collar for church and nothing else." Tobias took three weeks. He laid the shadows under the brow in tiny dots, thousands of them, one at a time, until the face seemed to lift out of the paper like a man out of morning haze.

When he finished, the mouth had a faint crook at one corner, as though the man had just heard a joke he would not repeat. Mrs Marlow looked a long while. "That's not how he looked when he left," she said. "That's how he looked when he was telling me he'd be fine." Tobias had not meant it. He had only followed the little dots where they wanted to go.

She hung it in the well house, facing the road. Drivers still stop there for water, and the old ones touch the collar on their way past, the way you touch a doorframe for luck. Nobody has asked Tobias why. He has never told them that the collar was the only part he finished in one sitting, because his hand would not stop.