Black and grey realism tattoo across the back of a shaved head, showing a hand holding a reflective sphere that mirrors a seated man in a room.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding a reflective sphere on the back of a head

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the back of a shaved head and shows a hand cupping a glossy sphere. The sphere reflects a room with a seated man, a doorway and a window, curving around the skull. The shading is smooth and detailed, with sepia-toned greys and no colour ink, and the design fills the whole visible scalp against a dark wall and a framed, colourful tiled fish print in the background.

Realism Other Hand Sphere Reflection Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, the lot of you, and mind the draught from the door, for this one is about a glass ball and the man who would not put it down. Old Ezra Pascoe kept the light at Scarrow Head for thirty-one years, and the winter his brother Tom drowned off the Mermaid Rocks, he hauled a green glass float out of the surf and carried it up the iron stairs as if it were a live thing. He set it on the sill of the lamp room, and after that he never went up without it.

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The ball caught the whole room in its belly. There was the stove, the brass rail gone dull with salt, the wooden chair where he sat with his pipe, and the great window beyond with the grey sea folded small inside it. Each night Ezra sat and looked at the little bent man in the glass sitting exactly as he sat, and he took comfort that the room was still there, curved and shrunk, and that he was still in it.

One January the glass showed the chair empty. Ezra turned round to find it so, and there in the doorway stood Tom, dripping and grinning in his oilskins, the way he used to stand when he came in late for his tea. Ezra blinked, and the doorway was only a doorway, shut and painted. He sat down in the chair. In the glass the chair filled with him again, and the room was ordinary, and the warmth in the ball under his palm was the only thing that had changed.

They found him at dawn with his hand still cupped beneath the glass, as though he had been holding up the whole room. I've held it since, and I'll tell you what I see there: nothing but ourselves, small and far off, and the sea keeping its own counsel.