Black and grey tattoo of a wide-eyed face wearing a pearl necklace, with a tall feathered shape rising above it, on a calf.

Grey face with pearl necklace on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A tattooed face with bulging eyes, a fleshy nose and a wrinkled brow sits at the lower part of the design, wrapped in a strap or cord and draped with a strand of pearls. A tall, feathered shape rises from behind the head towards the top of the frame, and a feathered plume curls out on the right. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth grey, with small red touches on the cheeks and forehead.

Japanese Calf Face Feather Creature Cord

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mask had been hanging from the handle of the vacuum cleaner since April, and nobody on the ninth floor of Ashgrove House would say who had put it there. It was a grey face, heavy in the cheeks, with eyes that bulged like something surprised in a rock pool. A cord was knotted under its chin and a string of pearls lay over its brow, and every morning the pearls seemed a little longer than the night before.

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Iris Dunmore ran the laundry room on the ground floor and had lived in the block since it was built. Her mother had told her that a face which is given a necklace will stop wanting its old owner, and that a face which is not given one will go looking. Iris thought this was nonsense until the lift began stopping at nine with its doors open and nobody in it, and long dark feathers started turning up in the bins, curled at the tips like the plume on a hat.

On the third Thursday she climbed the stairs with the cord in her hand. The landing smelled of wet concrete. Behind the door of flat 91, the one that had been empty since the fire, something was breathing slowly through a long nose, and the pearls on the carpet were laid out in a neat line, counted one by one.

She knotted the cord loosely round the banister, set the mask face up on the sill, and went back down without looking round. The next morning the mask was gone. In its place sat a single pearl, warm from the sun, and Iris put it in her apron pocket where she could feel it all day.