Black geometric linework tattoo of a woman's face and hair built from triangles, sitting on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric woman portrait on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's face in profile-leaning three-quarter view, with her curly hair formed from dense triangular and angular lines. The design is built from fine black lines that divide the face into facets, with shading created by denser hatching in the hair and along one side of the face. The image is black ink only, with the tattoo centred on a bare thigh and a towel visible at the edge of the frame.

Geometric Blackwork Thigh Woman Portrait Face Hair Triangle Geometric line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mattie Rowan kept a slate on the kitchen table, and on it she drew the faces of the men who went under and did not come up. She drew them with a nail and no ruler, because, she said, a ruler only ever lied about a line. When her grandson Tom asked why the faces were all made of corners, she told him the seam had no curves in it, only faults and angles, and that was how it remembered people.

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Tom was twelve when the cage stuck at the Hollin shaft. He went down with the rescue men carrying a lamp and a tin of chalk. In the flooded drift he found a wall where the coal had split along its lines, and the fractures made a shape like a woman turning her head, her hair a tangle of small hard triangles. He stood there so long his lamp guttered. Then he chalked every crack he could see, facet by facet, the way his grandmother had shown him at the table.

They brought him up two days later, half frozen, with chalk still under his nails. Nobody believed the face in the drift until the pump men went down and saw it for themselves, drawn in white over the black, every line traced true. The water was already dropping. Nobody knew who she was, so the boy wrote the only name he had for her, which was his grandmother's.

Mattie died that spring. Tom kept the slate, and when the new lamp tests came in he drew each face on it with the same nail, always starting with the hair, because that was where the seam kept its weight. The lines never quite met at the jaw, she had told him, so that the dead could leave by the gap.