Black and grey realism tattoo of a half face with one eye, nose and lips in a small rectangular panel on the upper arm.

Half face portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small rectangular panel on the upper arm shows a close crop of a face, with one eye, the nose and the lips visible and the rest cut away. The image is rendered in fine, soft greyscale shading with a photographic, halftone-like texture. The tattoo sits against plain pale skin, with a white crop top and grey trousers at the edge of the frame and a neutral white background.

Realism Upper arm Face Eye Portrait Lip Nose

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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

You find the first panel in a cardboard box of loose prints at the Saturday market, under a tarpaulin that drips onto your wrists. The stallholder, a man called Desmond with an unlit cigarette behind his ear, says the lot came out of a house clearance in Margate. Most of it has gone soft with damp and foxed at the corners, but this one has held: a woman's face cut down to a narrow strip, one grey eye looking past your shoulder, the nose, the mouth. Someone trimmed the rest away with a blade and kept only what they wanted to look at.

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You pay a pound more than he asks because the rain is loud and you want to be gone. At home you pin it to the mirror above the sink, and the eye keeps finding you. Every morning the kettle has boiled before you notice you have been looking at it, and you start to suspect the missing half is the part doing the watching.

The following Saturday Desmond's pitch is gone. In its place a woman in a green anorak sells vintage buttons from a biscuit tin. Under the tin, wrapped in a dry-cleaning sleeve, is a second panel: the other eye, the brow, the cheek, the edge of a chin. It is the same photograph, the same halftone dots, but when you hold the two together the tear lines do not meet. The nose sits a fraction higher on the right, as if the face was taken from a different morning.

"Where did you get these?" you ask. She shrugs and says the gentleman left them with her for whoever came back asking, and that he said you would know which half was yours. You turn the second panel over. On the back, in pencil, someone has written your postcode and the word later.