Colour tattoo of four stylised male faces in a row across the upper back, each with flat, solid fills in pink, blue, green and red.

Four stylised faces across the upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

Four simplified faces sit side by side across the upper back, each drawn as a flat, solid-filled silhouette with hair, eyes and facial hair picked out in negative space. The first has round glasses and a moustache, the second a moustache, the third a full beard and the fourth a moustache. Each face uses a single bold colour, pink, blue, green or red, with no visible shading, and the even spacing gives the piece a calm, graphic composition.

Back Face Portrait Hair Glasses Moustache Beard

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The card had gone soft at the edges by the time Ivy Haddow cut out the last of the four stencils at her kitchen table, and she had nicked her thumb twice with the craft knife, which her mother said was the card's fault for being so stubborn. Four heads sat side by side on the sheet, each with its own tuft of hair and its own patch of face left open for the paint to find. The committee wanted something for the hall window at the Methodist fete, something that would look like a row of neighbours if you squinted. Nobody had asked her who the neighbours were meant to be. She had only asked which tins were left in the shed.

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There was a pink from the nursery door, a blue meant for the boat that hadn't gone out since Easter, a green bought for the bench that never got its bench, and a red the council had given up on after the bollards. She laid the stencils on the glass and dabbed the sponge through the holes, and the first face came up pink with its round glasses and a moustache she had cut too thick and then decided to keep. The blue went quickly. The green would not sit in the beard. It bled through the card's cut edges and came out lumpy, like a hedge after rain.

Mr Pryce from the chapel stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and said it looked like a poster for a group he had never heard of. Ivy told him it looked like four men who had been asked to keep still for a photograph and had not managed it. He laughed, then went quiet, then asked her to tidy the red one's sideburns before the fete.

She did. On the morning of the fete the sun came through the glass and laid all four colours across the hall floor in long bars. The red had faded by then into a shade near the pink, and the four faces looked as if they had been cut from one sheet and argued over ever since.