Realism tattoo on a forearm combining an amber glass bottle, a black and white portrait of a long-haired man and a figure in a top hat.

Bottle and portrait collage on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A photographed forearm tattoo arranged as a collage. An amber glass bottle with a black label sits at the top left, beside a black and white portrait of a long-haired man with a skull tattoo on his arm, and a top-hatted figure at the upper right. The shading is smooth and detailed, with strong contrast in the greyscale portraits and warm orange tones in the bottle.

Realism Forearm Bottle Portrait Man Top hat Skull Collage Lettering

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

Nobody in Attercliffe pawned a bottle without a story attached, and most of my stock arrived with a better one than the item deserved. The amber bottle came in on a wet Tuesday, wrapped in a tea towel, its black label scorched at the corners. Bottled Adrenaline, it said, under a half-moon of print I could not read without my glasses. Someone had written a phone number on the back in biro and then crossed it out so hard the paper had torn.

Keep reading

The man who brought it was Terrence Vail, a sound engineer who had spent thirty years mixing other people's noise. He said the bottle had sat on a shelf above a desk in a studio in Leeds, and that a gentleman in a tall hat and a long coat had visited every Friday to lean on the glass and listen to the playback. Once, Terrence claimed, the gentleman left a single black feather on the mixing desk and was never seen again. I wrote the feather down in the ledger because it seemed rude not to.

I offered forty pounds. He wanted two hundred. We settled at sixty, and before he left he slid a black and white photograph across the counter. A singer with hair like wet rope stood with his head thrown back, a skull inked on his forearm, mouth open on a note nobody in the shop could hear. "Keep that," Terrence said. "The bottle only remembers the room. The picture remembers the rest."

I hung the photograph beside the till. At closing time, when the light from the street came through the window, the amber caught it and the singer seemed to draw breath before the shutter came down. I have never sold the bottle. When the heating comes on in the back room it gives off a smell of pennies and smoke, and Mr Oduya has asked me twice to put it in the storeroom. I haven't.