Colourful cartoon-style tattoo of a crowd of caricatured figures in hats and bow ties, shown in three side-by-side close-up views on a limb.

Caricature group portrait tattoo on a limb

Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a crowd of exaggerated, caricature-style figures packed together, several wearing top hats, bowler or wide-brimmed hats and bow ties. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft shading on faces and clothing. Bright teal, yellow, red and blue fill the background and clothing, and the image is composed as three side-by-side close-up panels.

Other Top hat Bow tie Hat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fourth sitter of the morning wanted to look like his brother, and his brother had not come, so I had to draw the brother from the description, which was mostly hats. Mr Pellow told me he was tall, wronged and fond of a good bow tie, so I gave the absent man all three. By eleven the pier was full of men who wanted to be drawn, and I had run out of pencil lead and patience in roughly that order.

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I had set up under the awning by the bandstand with a tin of watercolours, a board of cartridge paper and a hand-lettered sign promising Faces Done While You Wait, Sixpence. The trouble with caricature is that the customer always wants the nose a little worse than the real one, and then wants it a little better. I swapped a bowler from one man onto another, lent a bow tie to a bootlace salesman, and found that the crowd on my board had quietly grown to fill the whole sheet and spill over the edges.

It was Mrs Gedge who noticed. She stood behind the easel with her shopping bag, studied the paper and said the faces all wore the same expression, the worried look of someone who has just remembered the gas is on. I looked. She was right. Every figure, from the top-hatted gentleman at the back to the lad with teal braces at the front, had the same startled eyebrows, and every one of them was turning, very slowly, to look at me.

I put the brush down. The man in the wide-brimmed hat blinked first. Then I picked up the pencil and drew myself into the corner, looking exactly as worried as the rest of them.