Black and grey fine line tattoo of a simple camera outline on the side of the body, shown in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Camera outline tattoo on the side

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small camera outline is tattooed on skin, with a rectangular body, a raised viewfinder bump and a large circular lens. The linework is a single, even black outline with no shading or fill. The black and white photo is centred on the tattoo, with plain skin filling most of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Camera Outline Icon Lens

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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

You arrive at Gull Terrace in March, when the hall smells of wet coats and boiled cabbage, and Mrs Pardoe hands you a key on a brass fob shaped like a lens cap. 'Nobody takes the back room,' she says, 'not since Mr Elwood went off to the Lakes with his box camera and didn't come back for it.' The room has one window full of grey water and a nail in the wallpaper where a strap once hung.

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You find the sketchbook under the bed, its pages swollen from the sea air. Inside, the same camera is drawn again and again in one unbroken pencil line: the squared body, the small hump of the viewfinder, the round lens set in the middle like a full stop. There is no shading and no name, only the outline, as if he had wanted to remember the shape of the thing without its weight. You start copying it onto the back of your own ledger, between the coal bills and the milk, until the lines feel steadier than your handwriting.

One evening Mrs Pardoe catches you on the stairs with the book. She doesn't take it from you. She says the lens was the part he always got right, that he would sit in the lounge and look at the harbour through a curled finger and thumb, framing it. 'Round, he said, because that's how the eye sees. Everything square is just fencing.' You ask where he went. She shrugs towards the window. 'Somewhere with better light.'

Two weeks later the tide pulls back and leaves a wet silver film across the sand, and you go down with a borrowed box camera and a single frame. You close one eye and bring the viewfinder to it. The harbour fits neatly inside the circle, a grey boat sliding through the ring like a coin dropped into a slot. You press the shutter, and somewhere behind the seawall a gull lifts off the rail and is gone.