Realism tattoo of a fragmented classical marble statue face with magenta bars and thin black lines on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fragmented classical statue face on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a classical sculpted face, with a curled brow, a large eye and a nose and lips, split into offset rectangular blocks. The greyscale shading is smooth and realistic, and bright magenta bands cut across the eye and mouth. Thin black diagonal lines run through the composition, and the piece is photographed from two angles against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hal, the head came up from the cellar of the Corn Exchange in a crate of wet sacking, and I have not slept properly since. Carrara by the grain, a curled brow and one good eye, the other sheared clean at the lid. Whoever carved it knew how a face holds its breath.

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Mr Pryce wants it reassembled for the council hall by Lady Day. Of the four blocks that survived, I can only make two agree. The rest I have been cutting from the offcuts of a chimney piece, and every cut throws the features a quarter-inch off, so the eye sits above the mouth like a man who has walked into the wrong room. I tried hiding the joins with plaster and it looked like a bad photograph of itself.

So I mixed the seam resin with the magenta dye the bookbinder gave me, the stuff he uses for tooled spines, and laid it in bands where the cracks run. Pryce called it vulgar. Then at dusk, with the lamp set on the floor, the bands glowed like something left burning, and the black fault lines I scored along the breaks looked like the sweep of a compass. I could read the face by it for the first time.

Tomorrow I set the mouth. If it holds, I will leave the eye uncut and let the council see the crack and the colour together. Come up on the Thursday train and tell me I am a fool. Yours, Ada.

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