Realistic black and grey back tattoo of a bearded older man smoking a pipe, with hands holding a tin below, covering the back.

Bearded man with pipe on full back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a bearded older man with a pipe, surrounded by smoke wisps and swirling fabric-like shapes. The shading is highly detailed, with soft greys, deep blacks and bright highlights giving the face and hands a three-dimensional look. Small areas of red appear near the neck and collar, and a coloured tattoo is visible on the upper arm at the edge of the frame.

Realism Back Beard Pipe Smoke Hand Portrait Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smoke from Old Hallam's pipe was the only honest thing on the fairground, the boy Tobias decided, because it went where it liked and never asked for a penny. He had watched the old man sit on the same upturned crate outside the big top every evening since the rain started, his beard gone the colour of wet ash, his hands folded over a brass-lidded tin as if it held a sleeping bird.

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The fair was called Gellings and Sons, though there were no sons and nobody had been called Gelling for thirty years. The stalls shut at dusk. The horses were walked down to the river to drink, and the bunting sagged. Tobias had a tin of his own, two pennies and a horn button, and he wanted to know what the smoke would say about his mother, who had gone to the coast with the dancing bear and had not written.

Hallam did not ask for the pennies. He tapped the pipe against his heel and said the smoke would tell only what the wind allowed. He lit it, and the smoke rose in a thin grey column, then folded over itself like cloth shaken out and hung above the tent poles. Tobias watched the shapes form: a cart, a gull, a woman's shoulder turned away. Then the wind came off the river and pressed the whole thing flat, and it lay along the canvas like a sheet on a line.

'That's your answer,' Hallam said. 'She is going the way the wind goes. You will not catch her by standing still.' He pressed the lid of the tin shut, and Tobias saw how the old coat had frayed red at the collar, and understood he had been given a road instead of a comfort. He pulled his cap down and went to find the bear's trail along the towpath, the pennies still hot in his fist.