Colour realism tattoo of a grinning clown with a red nose and buildings behind it, across the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grinning clown face on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Colour · Photo

A large clown face fills the back of the hand, with a bulging dark eye, a bright red nose and a wide grin showing rows of teeth. Small buildings with lit windows sit against an orange sky at the top of the design. The shading is smooth and detailed, with green and grey tones on the face and warm reds and oranges in the background.

Realism Hand Clown Teeth Building Sky

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 was sold for scrap two winters ago, so the company now pitches a single tent behind the gasworks in Hollin Vale, where the sky goes the colour of rust every evening. You have been Grinny Pike for nineteen years. Tonight Dolores Abbs, the ringmaster, sits on an upturned crate and tells you the takings won't cover the diesel, and that the only thing still selling is the grin.

Keep reading

You sit at the mirror and press the red nose on with spirit gum, then lay the greens and greys over your cheeks until the grin is the largest thing in the room. Across the road the terraces have their lights on. Every night there are fewer of them, and tonight you count only five windows still glowing, each one framing a small face pressed to the glass.

The ring is three folding chairs, a dog that belongs to the caretaker, and a bucket you have been juggling since before the boy in the third window was born. You do the trick anyway. When you look up, the boy has a paper nose pinned to his jumper and is grinning at you with his teeth bared the way you taught him to on the wall outside the chip shop last summer. The dog barks once. The other windows go dark.

You peel the nose away and hold it in your palm, still warm and tacky. The sky above the gasworks finally goes black, and every window on the terrace lights at once, bright as a row of teeth. You wipe your face with the back of your hand, put the nose in your pocket, and walk out across the road to find out who has been waiting for you.