Solid black stencil-style design of a serene Buddha face with curled hair, topped by an Om symbol, on a plain white background.

Buddha face design with Om symbol

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black silhouette of a calm, stylised Buddha face with a row of curled hair across the crown and elongated ear shapes at the sides. A Sanskrit-style Om symbol sits above the head, and a further curling glyph and a tapering vertical line sit below the chin. The image uses only solid black shapes and open white space, with no colour or shading.

Blackwork Buddha Face Om symbol Curl Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting knife had gone dull by the time Tove Halloran reached the last of the curls. Forty-one sheets of oiled card lay drying on the lino of the Hull chandlery's back room, each one a face that would be sprayed through and split into cargo marks by Thursday. The freighter Marisol Vane was loading for Colombo and Osaka, and her agent wanted a calm seated Buddha on every crate lid, because a buyer in Rotterdam had asked for it and the agent had never once turned down a request that paid.

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Tove had cut the face four times. The first went in the bin when the ears came out like cupped hands, the second when the brow sat too heavy over the eyes, the third because the mouth had turned sour and looked like a man about to complain about the tide. The fourth she cut from memory of her father's hands on a tiller, a man who never sailed further than Flamborough but hummed when the wind dropped. She let the lower line taper to a plumb-thin stroke that would hold its shape in spray, and left a bridge of card between the Om and the crown so the knife would not lift it free.

The agent came at four, read the sheet twice, and asked why the glyph under the chin looked like a hook. She told him it was a word with its ending taken off, which was how most useful things travelled by sea. He asked whether it would survive salt. The card would not, she said, but the paint would, provided the stencil stayed dry and nobody leaned on it.

That night she carried the spare sheet home under her coat, held it up to the kitchen window, and watched the lamplight come through the holes where the black had been cut away. The calm face fell across the table in white, with the ship's outline printed beside it like a second thought. She pinned it to the wall and left it there, the way her father used to leave the porch light burning on nights the boat was still out.