Realism tattoo on a forearm blending a black and grey city skyline with a face whose grinning mouth and shaded eye sit in the lower half.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

City skyline and face on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey realism tattoo on the inner forearm combines a city skyline of tall office blocks at the top with a man's face below. The face is shaded with smooth gradients and fine detail in the wrinkles, eye and lips, and the skyline appears to merge into the upper part of the face. The arm rests on a black leather surface above a wooden floor.

Realism Forearm City Skyline Face Building Smile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hoarding on Cutler Street had stood blank since March, and the developer wanted something up by Friday that would make people look at the towers instead of the mud. Nell Brackley had the contract and a tin of grey gouache, and by Tuesday she had a skyline sketched in pencil across the top of eight sheets of ply: offices, a spire, the bank with its crown of lights. She said the bottom needed a face to hold it up.

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Her brother Tam came by with the van to help lift the panels. He studied the sketch for a long time and said the face looked like someone who'd been told a joke and hadn't got it yet. She didn't argue. She had been painting faces onto shop windows for twenty years and knew people stopped for a face the way they never stopped for a building. The chin came down past the kerb line. The eyes she left to last, two pale smudges set into the glass of the nearest tower, so the lit offices behind them seemed to be looking out.

On the Friday evening the rain came in sideways and the street emptied. Nell stood across the road in her coat and watched the grey city dissolve into a man's pinched, painted face, the mouth stretched in a grin wider than the board itself. A bus stopped. A woman stepped off, looked up, and laughed out loud, the way people laugh at a stranger's dog.

Nell waited until the bus had gone, then crossed over and rubbed one smear of red from the corner of the mouth with her thumb. It came away on her skin. She stood in the wet a while, deciding whether to repaint it, and then she left it, because the city had never looked so much like it was smiling at her.