Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a faceless woman with curled hair, painted tears and a dark lipstick mouth, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Faceless woman with curled hair on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised woman with a blank, shaded face, a small dark mouth and two teardrops below where her eyes would be. Her hair is set in tight curls framing the head, and a high collar sits at the base of the image. The design is rendered in black ink and grey with bold solid areas, fine hatching and stippled shading, and the forearm is shown in a close, straight-on crop.

Blackwork Traditional Forearm Woman Hair Curl Lip Tear Collar Portrait

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chairs in closer, the fire's only good for another hour and the snow isn't going anywhere. You've heard of the Hollow Crown inn on the Marrowdale road? Well, before the coaches stopped coming, a woman called Ada Corrigan kept the rooms above the chemist's in Hexworth, and every Friday she had her hair set. Tight curls, pinned close, so that by the time she went down the stairs she looked like a film star who'd lost her way to the pictures. Her husband Walter went out to fetch the milk cart in a blizzard the winter the lake froze, and he never came back up the hill.

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She stopped looking in the glass after that. Folk said she'd rather not see her face going grey, but the truth is she couldn't bear her own eyes. They wept so much the handkerchiefs went stiff, and the tears ran down past the lips she'd painted on every morning and never once smudged. She'd still set her curls, though, every Friday, and she'd still button her high collar right up to the chin, as if someone might come calling.

Someone did. On the first thaw, the carrier found her chair pulled to the window, facing the lane, the curls perfect and the room cold as a cellar. Nobody touched the mirror. Nobody needed to. Out in the slush, beside her own footprints, ran a second set, going up the hill towards the moor, and they were the boots Walter wore to the milk cart. Each set of tracks stopped at the same gate, and not a single print came back down again.