Black and grey collage tattoo on two forearms, with halftone dots, fine geometric linework, a portrait partly set in a teal block and small script.

Collage forearm sleeve with portrait and geometry

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows two forearms covered in a collage-style tattoo. The design combines a halftone portrait of a face set within a teal rectangle, a leafy shape, gear-like rings, a faceted diamond, a triangle with an eye, and fine connecting lines with dot terminals. Shading is built from stippled dots and soft black halftone, with a single block of teal as the only colour, and the sleeve fills the frame from the wrist towards the elbow.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Portrait Face Gear Leaf Diamond Triangle Eye Dot Line Collage Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The copper plate was already cracked when Hollis carried it up from the cellar, and he swore it had done so overnight to spite him. Forty years he had cut lines fine enough to hold a face for the printers on Mercer Street, but this commission was odd. A man in a grey coat wanted his likeness pulled in teal ink on a broadside for the canal company, and he wanted it bordered with gears, a diamond, and an eye inside a triangle. Hollis refused twice. The third time the man left a brass gauge on the bench, cut with facets like a cold stone, and said it would measure the plate true.

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He worked through the nights with a dotting punch, stippling the cheekbones until the face rose out of nothing. He took the escapement wheels from a dead clock and set them in rings around the head, and he cut the eye into the triangle because the printer insisted every broadside needed a seal. Beneath the portrait he set a line of small type from a book the grey-coated man had left behind: imagination is more important than knowledge. The dots at the corners were the last thing he added, each one joined to the next by a fine line, like a survey of some country no one had walked.

The proofs came back printed twice. One sheet showed the face whole in black. The other showed it slid a finger's width to the left, with the teal block laid over the eyes so that only the mouth and chin could be seen. Hollis sent word to the canal office that the second sheet was spoiled. The grey coat arrived before the message could have reached anyone, took up the spoiled sheet, and folded it into his breast pocket without looking at the first.

Hollis kept the proof he had been told to destroy. He pinned it above the bench and held the diamond gauge against the corner of the sheet. Every dot lined up with the edge of the facets, and the line from the last dot ran straight through the eye in the triangle to the window. He has not asked himself, in all the years since, which of the two faces the canal company hung in its hall.