Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line mother and child on the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line outline of an adult's face in profile leans towards a smaller child's head, which rests against it. The linework is thin and unshaded, in black ink on smooth skin. The tattoo is centred on the lower back, with a white top visible at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Back Mother Child Profile Line art Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire only has an hour left in it, and the road doesn't care whether you're listening. You want to know about Hana Mirzai, who drove the salt road to Wadi Shal with her daughter asleep across the passenger seat, and who never once lifted her pencil from the paper. Her brother said that was a trick. The well keeper said it was a lie. I say she drew the whole of her life in one unbroken line, because that is the only way a line gets to the end of anything.

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The daughter was called Dunya, nine years old, and cross with her mother since the morning they left the market at Qasr Hadid. Hana had sold her own loom to pay for petrol. Dunya would not look at her. So Hana took a stub of carpenter's pencil and, on the back of a bus ticket, tried to draw the girl's face the way it used to be when she was small, the nose turned up, the chin tucked down. The pencil kept skipping. Every time it lifted, the cheek came out wrong.

Somewhere past the dry lake the engine coughed and died. They sat in the heat with the windows down while the sun crawled across the dashboard. Dunya leaned over to see the drawing, and Hana, without thinking, let her head tip sideways until it rested against her daughter's. The pencil stayed on the ticket and kept moving. When the girl finally laughed, the line ran off the edge of the paper and onto the back of Hana's wrist, and it kept running there.

The mechanic from Wadi Shal found them two days later and said the drawing was unfinished. Hana said it was done. She had found the one thing she could not lift the pencil from, and that was enough. Dunya still keeps the ticket. The line is faint now, but if you follow it with your finger you will arrive back where you began, and that is the whole trick of it.