Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a stylised face with spiky hair and a lightning bolt across one eye, on the upper arm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lightning bolt face portrait on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised male face with swept-up spiky hair, closed eyes, and a lightning bolt running diagonally across the upper face, with a small drip shape below the chin. The bold outlines are combined with stippled dotwork shading on the cheeks and jaw, giving the portrait depth. The tattoo is black and grey and sits on the outer upper arm near the elbow, with plain skin and a dark garment filling the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tram out of Hollins Road pulls away with you still holding the stencil roll under your arm, the ink on your thumb not quite dry. Rain smears the streetlights into yellow bars on the glass. Across the aisle a woman sleeps with a carrier bag of chips going soft on her knee, and you keep thinking about the face you drew at the kitchen table that afternoon, split down the middle by a bolt of lightning, eyes shut as if it heard the thunder coming and decided not to flinch.

Keep reading

Dev is waiting in the back room at the Crown Arcade, where the sign has only three working letters and the floor sticks to your shoes. He has two mugs of tea gone cold and the face of a man who has already said no. "Tell me it's not another rock star," he says. You tell him it's a face that changed its name every few years and never once let anyone draw it with its eyes open. He snorts, then unrolls the stencil under the lamp and goes quiet. The bolt runs corner to corner, clean as a cut.

For a fortnight you have been stippling oranges at two in the morning, learning to build the hollow of a cheek out of dots so small they only show when the light hits them from the side. Dev thumbs the jawline and asks why the drip hangs under the chin like that. You say it's the last of the rain, the kind that runs off the brim of a hat after the storm has already moved on. He doesn't argue. He just clears a space on the bench and lays the needles out in a row, bright and ready.

By the time the shutter comes down the stencil is pinned to the wall, and the street outside has gone quiet except for one bus idling at the stop. You catch your reflection in the dark glass, a little tired and a little pleased, and the bolt across the face in the window looks less like ink now and more like a crack that has finally let the light through.

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