Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm showing a woman's face with a dark band across the eyes and a silhouetted forest of bare trees above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest and face forearm tattoo

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's face with the nose and lips shaded in soft greys, and a dark band across the eyes. Silhouetted bare trees rise above the band and their reflections run down through the face. The background is black, and part of a person's ear is visible at the right edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Harrowgate Travelling Show had sold its elephant to a farmer in March and lost its big top to a gale in April, so by September there was little left to sell except the knife-throwing. Ada Quill was seventeen and her father's only target. She had never once been struck, and she said that was because she could not see the blades coming, though her father told it differently.

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Each night before the band struck up, Ada tied a strip of black silk across her eyes and stood with her back to the painted forest at the end of the ring. Her father threw from the far side. The canvas trees were older than the show, and the travelling folk said that if you looked between their trunks long enough you could see the road home. Ada said the trees grew down through her face and out again at the chin, and that a girl who stepped into the reflection came out the other side with her own eyes gone grey.

Nobody believed her until the last Saturday in October, when the takings came to eleven shillings and the bank man rode out to collect the wagon. Her father's hand slipped. The blade went wide and split the canvas beside her. When Ada pulled the silk away, the forest behind her had lost its far row of trees, and a pale road ran straight through the gap to the edge of the field.

They packed the wagons before dawn and left her standing in the empty ring with the last lamp lit. The village children still say that on frosty mornings a woman walks the hedgerow road with a folded black strip in her hand, asking every carter she meets whether he has seen the show go past.

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