Classical helmeted statue in profile

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a classical statue of a helmeted figure in profile, with curled hair, a plumed or winged helmet and a carved, sculpted face. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients on the cheek, brow and drapery and sharper highlights on the helmet and hair. The design fills a curved limb and is set against a blurred light background.

Realism Other Helmet Profile Curl Figure Drapery

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They held the reunion in the hall because the gym roof was still leaking, and Mrs Ashdown carried the plaster head in from the art room herself, wrapped in a tea towel like a loaf. Nobody had ever been allowed to touch it. It was a helmeted youth with a plume rising from his crown and curls stacked above his ears, and he looked sideways at the door as if he had been told to wait.

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Old Tom Kerrigan, who had been in the back row of every class photograph, said the head had come from a dealer in Leeds for four pounds in 1962, and that the dealer swore it was a copy of something in a museum far away. The pupils had a rule. You did not stare him full in the face, and you never left him looking at a wall. Whoever set him down had to turn him towards the light first, or the school would have a bad year.

That evening, when the urns had boiled dry and the last of the sponge had gone, Dorothy Pike, who had buried a husband and a sister in the years between, stood at the window and turned him so his profile caught the streetlamp. She said he had always watched the road out of town, the way a boy watches for a coach that is late. Then she buttoned her coat and walked home the same way.

In the morning the caretaker found the head where it had been left, facing the car park, with a single chestnut leaf caught in his curls. Nobody could say who had put it there, though everybody agreed the window had been open.