Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bottle with a simple face on the inner forearm, with part of another design visible at the top edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bottle with a face on the forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bottle with a simple line-drawn face, showing closed eyes and a small smile, sits on the inner forearm. The outline is solid black and the bottle body is filled with stippled dots that give it a grainy, shaded look. The plain pale wall behind the arm keeps the focus on the tattoo, with a partial design cut off at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Forearm Bottle Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the fire is low and this is the part where the bottle opens its eyes. You all know the one. It was the last thing left in the drowned chapel at Saltcombe, a green-black bottle fat at the belly and narrow at the neck, and when Old Tamsin lifted it from the altar rail the stopper gave a little sigh, like someone turning over in bed.

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Nobody had made glass like that since the sea took the furnaces. The bottle had kept whatever was inside it for three hundred years, and it was not a cordial or a tonic. Tamsin held it up to the window and saw a face pressed into the side, eyes shut and a small crooked smile on it, as if the thing had just had a very good dream and did not want to be woken for the tide.

She meant to trade it to the tinker from Brackwater, who paid in dried mackerel and matches. But the tinker took one look at the sleeping face, crossed himself, and walked off up the shingle without his fish. So Tamsin kept it on her windowsill, where it hummed on still nights and went quiet whenever a boat was lost.

Then came the winter the harbour froze. The children of the town began leaving their own small wishes beside it, and by spring the smile had spread a little wider. Tamsin swore the bottle had never looked so pleased with itself. And the morning the last storm finally came up the coast, the bottle sat on the sill with its eyes shut, and the sea stayed in its bed beside it.