Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman's face on a calf, with lettering on the thigh and a winged design on the hip, shown on a bed.

Black and grey portrait tattoo on a leg

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on a striped bed with their legs crossed and tattoos on the lower leg, thigh and hip. The largest piece is a shaded portrait of a woman's face on the calf, with a lighter wing or floral element around it. The thigh carries dense lines of small lettering, and the hip has a shaded winged design; all the work is in black and grey.

Realism Calf Thigh Portrait Woman Face Wing Lettering Line

Find an artist for this

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 fair pitched on the water meadows below Hallow Ferry the week the river came up brown, and by the second night the showman's wife had stopped sleeping. She sat up in the ghost train with a candle, listening to the canvas. Her husband, Amos Pell, had bought a painted board from a sign-writer in Lincoln: a woman with heavy-lidded eyes and grey wings folded at her shoulders, a lily in one hand. He hung it above the fortune booth and charged nothing to look at it. Nobody remembered agreeing to that.

Keep reading

Tilly, who sold the tickets, said the woman had begun to write. Not on the board, but in the margin of the ferry ledger that Amos kept in a biscuit tin, in a small square hand. Names, one under another, each with a year beside it. Some were people who had crossed the river that season. Some were people buried in Hallow churchyard for a hundred years. At the foot of the last page was Amos's own name, and beside it, in fresh ink, the year the ferry would be sold.

Amos carried the board down to the bank at dusk and laid it face up in the shallows, the way you'd settle a dog. The current took it past the willows. In the morning it lay on the mud below the ferry steps, dry at its edges and not a line lifted. Its wings had gone the grey of wet slate. The ledger was in the tin where it always was, and the last entry had been crossed through with a single neat stroke.

Tilly took the board home that afternoon and hung it in her kitchen where the window faced west. Amos did not come back for it. The fair moved on to Spalding with a new fortune booth and a new painted sign, and some said he had gone with it, and some said he had simply stepped onto the ferry one evening and let it carry him across to the other bank, where nobody thought to ask him for his fare.