Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a bespectacled man with a faceted, geometric face, sitting on the forearm.

Geometric portrait of a man on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bust-length portrait of a man in dark-framed glasses, wearing a collared shirt and bow tie, with his short swept hair outlined and set against a sunburst of radiating black lines. The face is split into flat, angular blocks of orange, teal, green, red, brown and cream, while the shirt and hair use soft grey shading. The design is centred on the forearm and is filled with bold black outlines and saturated colour.

Neo-trad Geometric Forearm Portrait Man Glasses Bow tie Sunburst Hair

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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

Right, shift up and let the fire breathe. You want the one about Ambrose Tuttle and the window he would not finish? Good. It was the winter the gas failed along Hebden Street, and his shop on the corner kept a lamp burning all night, because Ambrose could not work in the dark and could not sleep without the sound of his own cutting wheel.

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He made glass for chapels and public houses, squares of amber and teal and bottle green, and one small red triangle he kept in a tin like sugar. One wet evening a man came in wearing a bow tie and heavy black spectacles, carrying a sketch of his own face. He asked for it in glass, cut into so many pieces that nobody could ever take in the whole of it at once. Ambrose said it could not be done. The man laughed and said that was what everybody said about his face.

Ambrose worked nine nights. Each block he set in lead, and the lead ran out from behind the head in thin rays, like the spokes of a church clock. On the tenth night he fitted the last piece, turned the lamp down and stood at the street window to see how the light fell. There, where the streetlamp reached the glass, was the stranger's reflection, his face laid out in blocks of orange and teal, watching him back.

The man was never seen on Hebden Street again, and the window hangs in the back room still. Go and look at it sometime. Count the pieces. You will never get the same number twice, and that, my love, is the whole trick of it.