Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman with curled hair and pearl drop earrings, placed on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey realism portrait on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large portrait of a woman with curled, light-toned hair, shown from the shoulders up, fills the upper thigh. The face is built from smooth, fine shading with soft highlights on the cheeks, lips and hair, and the background is a pale halo of grey wash. The image is taken at close range against a mirror-like gilded frame, and the tattoo is the clear focus.

Realism Thigh Portrait Woman Pearl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The rain has not let up since Thursday, and the market on Quayside Row has turned to mud and cardboard. I took the stall over from Mrs Okonedo when her hip went, and she left me a tin of brass studs, a set of scales that sticks, and a portrait nobody will buy. It is a copy of a face painted on a board, the sort of thing a travelling man sold for two shillings in her mother's day. Curls the colour of old cream, a halo washed in grey behind them, and pearls hanging from each ear as if she had just been told a secret she liked.

Yesterday a woman in a yellow mac stopped to stare at it for so long the rain ran off her hood onto my scales. She asked if the pearls were real. I said they were only paint, but she bought the necklace off the next stall anyway, the one with the cracked clasp, and asked Mr Dhillon to string it again for her. I thought that was the end of it.

Today she came back. She had the pearls on a loop of thread around her wrist and wanted the board taken down, every nail pulled, so she could carry it home under her arm. She said her father had painted it, years ago, before he left for the docks and never sent word. I did not ask whether she believed it.

I wrapped the board in the market's old tarpaulin and she walked off into the wet with the halo tucked under her coat. I have hung the scales back up, and the stall looks very bare. Come home at Easter if you can. The necklace is still here, and so is your room.

Love, Nell