Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman with long hair and a direct gaze, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey portrait of a woman on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey portrait of a woman with long, centre-parted hair, looking straight ahead. Fine, layered linework and soft shading give the face and hair a detailed, photographic finish. Partial lettering is visible at the left edge, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against pale skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ezra Coyle had cut the names of forty drowned men onto a Hull harbour board before anyone asked him to cut a face. Ada Penrose came up his workshop steps on a wet Tuesday with a photograph folded inside her glove. "She has to look straight out at the water and not blink," she said. "Can you manage that?"

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He worked nine days on a block of pear wood, laying the hair in fine layered strokes so it fell over the shoulders like rain running off a slate roof. The eyes took longest. He cut them, lifted the burr with a scraper, and cut again, until the woman in the wood seemed to be waiting for a boat that was late. Ada came each evening to check the parting and the way the hair sat behind one ear. Once she laughed and said the mouth was too stern for her sister. He left it as it was, because the photograph had been stern too.

The engraving went to press in March beneath a single line of type, and the paper sold out by noon at the Corn Exchange. Ada bought the first pull for a shilling and folded it into her coat. Years later, when Ezra's shop was sold and the boards were stacked for the furnace, she wrote asking for the block back.

He told her he had burned it the week before. That was a kindness, not the truth. The block lay in the bottom drawer under the ledgers, and in its lower margin, where no printer would ever ink it, he had cut a small crooked anchor the night she first climbed his steps.

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