Two forearms joined by an abstract cubist tattoo of two faces, a wine glass and red script reading happiness is only real when shared, in black, grey and red ink with ochre accents.

Cubist faces across two forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spans both forearms and shows two stylised faces in a cubist, fragmented style, with a wine glass and a block of red handwritten script beneath them. The linework is bold black with fine stippling, dashed lines and hatched textures in the hair and cloth-like areas. Dark grey and black fill the shapes, with red and ochre accents adding colour across the composition.

Forearm Face Script Abstract shape Dashed line Hatching Stippling

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pears were dropping faster than we could gather them, so Marta and I gave up on the baskets and sat under the old Conference tree with a bottle of perry between us. She poured with the care of someone measuring paint, one glass with a chipped rim for herself and the other for me. Wasps worked the windfalls in the long grass, and the light came through the leaves in pieces, like something she would have cut apart and laid out on a board.

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We had been arguing about the same canvas since June. It hung in her studio above the cider press, two faces split down the middle and stitched back together with black lines that ran off the edges like a surveyor's notes. I called it a wall with ambitions. She said a face is only a face once someone else is looking at it, and drank, and looked up at the tree instead of at me.

"You could sell it," she said. "Someone would hang it in a hallway and never look at it twice."

"That is exactly what I am afraid of." She tipped the bottle toward my glass and the last of it went in, pale and fizzing. I asked what the red handwriting underneath was for, the words she had insisted on painting last, and she said they were for whoever bothered to read the thing properly.

We finished the bottle without toasting anything. At dusk she stood, took both glasses, and poured a thin ribbon of perry onto the roots of the Conference tree. It seemed a waste to me until she handed back my empty glass and said, "Now it has had its share." Then she walked toward the press, and I stayed under the branches turning the chipped glass in the blue light, waiting for her to notice that I had not moved.