Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bearded profile portrait on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a two-panel view: a black ink drawing of a bearded man in profile with swept-up hair on the left, and a photograph of the same design tattooed on an arm on the right. The tattoo uses fine linework and stippled dotwork to build the face, beard and hair in tonal areas. The palette is black ink on skin and paper, with the composition centred on the profile.

Dotwork Upper arm Profile Portrait Hair Beard Face

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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 widow wanted her husband's beard to look like a wave about to break, and she said so three times before the first block of Parian marble was even unloaded in my master's yard. I was nineteen and had only ever cut lettering for tombs, so the job fell to me while he went off to quarrel with the mason across the street.

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Stone does not want to be hair. You have to drill it with a pointed bronze tool, thousands of small strikes that leave pits no bigger than a lentil, and then you let the pits do the shading. I worked by a single oil lamp through the cold months. By midwinter my knuckles had split and the dust sat in my palm creases like soot. The brow was the hardest part. A heavy lid makes a man look either tired or contemptuous, and the difference is one slope of a chisel's edge.

When she finally came to see it, she walked slowly round the bust twice without speaking. Then she said the face was wrong. He did not look at her, she said, he looked past her at something on the road, as though someone had called his name from the gate. I told her I had carved what I was given. She touched the cheek where I had left the stone rough and said, 'That is exactly how he was when he was listening to someone he did not trust.' Then she paid in full and asked me to keep the rough patches.

We set it in the courtyard the next morning. Rain came in off the sea before noon and sat in the dotted hair, every pit holding a bead of water, so the whole head seemed to smoke in the grey light. The widow stood under the eaves with her hands folded and watched the gate. I understood then that she had not been asking for a likeness at all. She wanted him looking at the road, and I had given it to her.