Black and grey tattoo of a woman's head and shoulders with an updo decorated with flowers, drawn in engraved-style linework and hatching, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey portrait of a woman on thigh

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's head and shoulders in profile-leaning three-quarter view, with dark hair in an updo trimmed with small flowers, drop earrings and a dark top. The image uses bold black outlines, dense solid black areas in the hair and fine hatched lines across the face and clothing. The piece is entirely black and grey on pale skin, centred on the thigh with plenty of empty skin around it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The shop on Quay Street has finally let me have the back table for the lino blocks, so I am writing this from a stool that smells of turpentine and last night's fish. Mrs Okonedo brought the portrait in on Tuesday, the one you said I would never finish. She wanted her grandmother's face cut in black, flowers pinned up in the hair the way the old women wore them for the Sunday boat blessing, and she did not want a single grey line. I told her grey was the colour of the harbour wall in January, and she laughed and said then make it black.

So I took the gouge to the blocks. The hair went first, heavy solid cuts that left the white showing only where the flowers sat, two clusters like small storms above the ears. The face took three evenings. I hatched the cheeks with fine lines the way the ropemakers marked their coils, and I left the mouth almost bare, because she has your habit of pressing her lips shut when she is about to say something true.

When it was printed, the wet ink lay so dark on the paper that the gull outside the window came in to look at it. Mrs Okonedo held it up to the lamp, said nothing for a long while, then asked whether the print would survive the sea air. I said it would, if she kept it out of the rain.

Come home safe. The second block is waiting for you.

Eleni

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