Black and grey realism tattoo portrait of a man with slicked-back hair and a moustache, holding a cigarette, shown on skin.

Black and grey realism portrait holding a cigarette

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts a older man with slicked-back hair, a furrowed brow and a moustache, wearing a dark jacket and collared shirt, and holding a cigarette near his chest. The shading is smooth and detailed, with fine hair texture, soft gradients on the skin and deep blacks in the jacket. The portrait fills the frame against a pale background, with the cigarette and raised hand adding a diagonal to the composition.

Realism Other Portrait Man Cigarette Moustache Jacket Hair Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cigarette case came across the counter at ten to six, still warm from a jacket pocket, and I knew before I opened it that the initials were wrong. Someone had scratched an H over a T, the way a man does when his luck changes hands and he wants the metal to keep up with him. Rain was running down the window of Harker and Sons on Lower Redcliffe Street, and the gas fire ticked behind me like it wanted to be somewhere else.

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The man who had brought it in wore his hair combed back so hard it looked lacquered, and he kept one hand near his chest as though the case might wander off on its own. "Forty pounds," he said. "Or thirty and a light." I told him the case was worth more than the light, and that whoever had cut the H didn't know a T from a crossroads. He didn't flinch. He struck a match from a box he'd clearly carried for years, lit a cigarette, shook the flame out, and asked whether I'd ever waited for a train that didn't come.

The engraving under the lid was faint but I could read it: For T. Haskett, from Mother, 1938. My father had owned a case like that. He had gone out for cigarettes one Tuesday in 1951 and the case had gone out with him, and nobody in our house had said his name since. I looked at the man's hands, steady and patient, and understood that he had not come to sell anything. He had come to see whether I would recognise it.

I counted out thirty pounds and put the case in the drawer under the ledger. "Come back in a week," I said. "Bring the light." He nodded, dropped the stub on my clean floor, and ground it out with the heel of his shoe. When the door closed, the bell over it went on swinging long after the street had gone quiet, and the ash he'd left was still there in the morning, shaped like a question mark.