Four illustrated paper dolls with fine black linework tattoos covering their chests and arms, two with moustaches and beards, shown against pale walls.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four tattooed paper dolls

Chest · Mixed · Flash

Four illustrated paper dolls, two male and two female, are shown with their upper bodies covered in black linework tattoo designs. The designs include hearts, floral motifs and ornamental panels drawn across the chest, shoulders and arms. The figures wear coloured clothing such as orange, red and striped fabric, set against a plain pale background in a grid of four panels.

Chest Upper arm Forearm Heart Floral Ornament 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

The show folded up on a Tuesday, and by Thursday Mrs Pilcher had the four of us laid out on her kitchen table like a hand of patience. She cut us from the card the old way, with a blade and a steady wrist, and she had inked every one of us herself the winter before, a little at a time, so the lines on our chests seemed to breathe when the lamp swung. My own heart sat under my collarbone, pierced twice, a garland of ivy looping down the arm. Ada had the roses. Nobody ever asked Harold what his ornament meant, though he made up a different answer every time.

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When the carter came for the crates, Mrs Pilcher folded us into an envelope lined with tissue and wrote a name on the front that was not any of ours. We rode in the dark for a long while, smelling of paste and cold tea. Somewhere past the market town the envelope was opened by a boy with ink on his fingers, and he held each of us up to the window one at a time, turning us slowly, as if he were checking that the lines still ran true.

He did not think we were pretty. He thought we were instructions. He pinned Harold to the wall above his bench, pinned the two ladies side by side, and set a small brass weight on my shoulder so I would stop curling at the edges. Then he went to fetch his mother, who had seen a great many tattooed people in her time and who wanted, she said, to see whether paper could hold still for it.

It could. We were on that wall for thirty years, and in all that time nobody once asked us to stop looking at them.