Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Buffalo nickel coin tattoo on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo of a Buffalo nickel, showing the profile portrait of a figure in a feathered headdress with the date 1928 at the lower left. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients on the face and headdress and a dark rim around the coin's edge. The photograph is taken close up on a bare leg with a patterned pair of shorts at the top of the frame.

Realism Thigh Coin Portrait Headdress

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

The coin came across the counter at Halloran's on a wet Thursday, wrapped in a bus timetable, and Dot Vine knew from the rim alone that it was worth more than the twenty quid the lad was asking. She tilted it under the lamp. The date sat low and soft, 1928, with no mint mark beside it, and the profile on the front had been worn smooth as a thumbprint on a windowpane. "My nan kept it in a tin of buttons," he said. "Says it's lucky. Says it was her dad's before it was anyone's."

Keep reading

Dot had heard a hundred stories like that and believed perhaps six. She weighed the nickel in her palm, checked the edge with her loupe, and asked him what the twenty quid was for. He said a train to Carlisle, a suit that fitted, and a school reunion in a hall that still smelled of floor polish, where a girl named Sandra Pike had once told him he would amount to nothing. He said it like a joke, but he didn't laugh.

She offered him two hundred and forty, which was fair, and he looked at the figure as though she'd insulted his grandmother. Then he laughed after all and said Sandra would have to make do with a photograph. They settled on two hundred and sixty, cash, and he signed the book with a hand that shook only a little.

After he left, Dot set the coin back in the lamplight rather than the tray. The profile faced the door, the way it always had, as if it were already halfway out into the rain and in no hurry to come back.