Castle and woman's face blend on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large realism piece shows a woman's face in profile, half fading into a stone castle with pointed towers and stepped gables above a mass of trees. Birds and a small boat on water sit in the lower section. The work uses soft, detailed shading in black and grey ink, with smooth gradients across the skin and face and textured foliage.

Realism Thigh Castle Face Woman Tree Foliage Bird Boat Water Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Point had been broken since March, so Nell carried her father's box of drawings down fourteen flights, one hand on the rail and the other pressed to the lid. He had drawn castles on the backs of gas bills for thirty years, always the same one: pointed towers, stepped gables like the houses on a biscuit tin, and a lake at the bottom where a single rowing boat waited with its oars shipped.

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The council wanted the flat cleared by the end of the month. The housing officer had been kind about it, in the way people are kind when they hold a clipboard. Nell sat on the bottom step and found the drawing she was looking for, dated the week before he died, with a woman's face half finished in the margin. He had never got the face right. He used to say the castle was easier, because it never looked back at you.

She walked out past the bins to the reservoir, where gulls turned over the grey water. The boat was there, chained to a post, its paint blistered down to bare wood. She went back for the scissors in her coat and cut the chain at the link that had rusted through. The boat drifted a yard, then stopped against the reeds, as though it had been waiting for permission.

She did not row out. She sat on the bank and held the drawing up against the real towers across the water, where the flats caught the last of the light on their stepped balconies. If she let her eyes go soft, the face was there after all. On the back, in his small careful capitals, he had written: ROW IF YOU WANT TO. Nell folded the paper into her pocket, stepped into the cold shallows, and took hold of the bow.