Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman wearing a lace mask, with mechanical ribbed shapes above her head, across a person's shoulder and upper arm.

Lace-masked woman portrait on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face wearing an ornate lace mask is shown in fine black and grey shading, with her eyes, lips and nose rendered in detail. Above her, a mechanical structure of ribbed, metallic-looking forms curves over the shoulder cap. Soft grey gradients and sharp dark highlights give the piece depth against the skin, which is shown in a close, slightly angled photograph.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Woman Face Eye Lip Mechanical Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Bedford has been coughing since Salt Tooth Junction, and by the time you coast onto the shoulder the bonnet is ticking like a cooling oven. Heat rises off the tarmac in sheets. You lift the bonnet and the radiator fins look back at you in ribs, row on row, dulled to pewter by the sun, and one of them, you swear, has shifted.

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The woman who walks up out of the dust has a black lace mask pinned over her eyes and a jerrycan in each hand. She does not ask what's wrong. She sets the cans down, unscrews a cap with her thumb, and says the fan belt on your Bedford was cut to fit a drawing made fifty years ago, the same way this desert was cut to fit a surveyor's map. She says it as though she has measured both herself.

She fetches a length of grey hose from the boot of her own car, and while you work she hums something without a tune, tapping the fins with one knuckle as if counting them. Each tap rings clearer than the last. You stop asking how she knows the model and start asking how long she has been waiting out here.

When the engine catches, she is already walking back toward the ridge, the lace catching the light like frost on wire. You check the mirror. The road ahead runs straight and empty, exactly as the map promised, and you realise you have not once seen her face without its netting, and that you have decided, somewhere between the ribs and the hum, not to.