Colour realism tattoo of a horror doll face with stitches and a forehead scar, with blue shading, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horror doll face with stitches on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A doll-like face with a stitched mouth, stitched cheek and a scar across the forehead, drawn with a blue eye and blue shading on one side of the face. The shading is soft and painterly, with smooth blends of blue, pale skin tones and red on the scar. The face fills most of the frame, shown on a limb with the tattoo sitting close to the camera.

Realism Forearm Doll Face Stitches Scar Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry's last crossing leaves at four, and by three the boat shed behind the pier smells of tar and wet rope. That is why you go there, not to the harbour office with its curling tide tables. Mr Tennant made toys for the mainland shops until his hands gave out, and the thing you find under a tarpaulin is one of his: a wooden-jointed doll with a face painted like a child who has been told a secret. One cheek is pale. The other is blue, as if the paint ran short halfway through and he topped it up with whatever was on the bench.

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Someone has stitched its mouth shut with black thread, a row of tight little crosses. The cheek has been stitched too, and across the brow a red scar runs crooked, still tacky to the touch. You tell yourself the children on the island are cruel, which is the sort of thing you tell yourself before you pick a thing up and put it in your coat.

For three nights it sits on your windowsill and the stitches stay as they were. On the fourth morning the mouth is open. The black thread lies in a neat coil on your kitchen table, and the doll is on your front step, turned towards the water, one blue eye fixed on the mainland where the ferry is already churning out past the breakwater. Behind you the gulls go quiet, the way they do before someone on the island has a visitor.