Colour realism portrait tattoo of a man in yellow aviator glasses with a cigarette in his mouth, on the inner forearm, with ink drips above and below the face.

Colour portrait of a man in yellow aviator glasses

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a man's face and upper shoulders wearing yellow-tinted aviator glasses, with a cigarette held between his lips. The face is split by strong colour, with warm orange and red on one side and cool blue on the other, and ink-like drips run across the top and bottom edges. Smooth shading and fine detail in the eyes, lips and glasses give the portrait a realistic finish, photographed on a forearm against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hear the barge before you see it, the diesel knock of the Marigold coming up the Oxford Cut at dusk, and you already know the man at the tiller will be wearing those yellow glasses. Nobody on the towpath has ever seen his eyes. He says the tint is for the glare off the water, but the lock keepers say it is for the sun he never got to see on the brewery run.

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You take the job anyway, because the pay is in cash and the cargo is only paint, tins of it, red stacked on one side of the hold and cobalt on the other. He hands you a cigarette you do not light. The smoke goes straight up in the still air and stops, hanging there like a question nobody wants to ask. Somewhere under the bridge the water starts to run backwards, the way it does when a sluice is opened too early, and the tins begin to tip.

By the time the lock keeper arrives, the paint has bled across the planks in long dark runs, pooling where the hull meets the water. The man at the tiller takes off his glasses for the first time and wipes them on his sleeve. His eyes are plain and tired and not the colour of anything. He tells you the Marigold is yours now, paint and all, and steps off onto the towpath without looking back.

You stand at the tiller until the lights at the lock go out, and the water, slowly, goes back to being brown.

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