Black ink portrait of a woman with flowers in her hair, labelled FRIDA KAHLO beneath it, on the inner forearm.

Frida Kahlo portrait on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black portrait of a woman with her eyes closed and flowers in her hair sits on the inner forearm, with the name FRIDA KAHLO in bold capitals below. The portrait uses solid black shapes and sharp contrasts rather than fine shading, with a few lighter flecks around the head. The plain background is a green fabric sleeve on the left and a pale surface on the right, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Forearm Portrait Woman Flower Lettering

Find an artist for this

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 big top had three poles left and a bank letter pinned to the ticket box, so nobody argued when Ada Vance asked me to paint her on the lead wagon instead of the usual clown. I used the black enamel we kept for lettering, because it was what we had, and I worked from memory of her in the lamplight: eyes shut against the glare, a scatter of marigolds caught in her hair from the last parade of the season.

Keep reading

She sat for me once, on an upturned crate behind the horse lines, and she did not open her eyes the whole time. If I look at you, you'll paint me looking back, she said, and I haven't the nerve for that any more. So I gave her the shape of a woman listening to music nobody else could hear, and I kept the shadows hard, because the light under canvas had always been hard. Flecks of gold leaf clung to the edges where the old sign had flaked.

The council came in March. The wagons went to a yard outside Hull, the lions to a sanctuary in Norfolk, and the tent was folded into a lorry that smelled of sawdust for a week after. Ada took the train south with a carpetbag and a cough she pretended was the weather.

I finished the board alone in the empty field. Under the face I wrote her name in plain capitals, the way she had wanted it on the posters, and then I leaned the board against the gate where the morning sun would reach it first.