Black fine line tattoo of a stylised woman's face with flowing hair on the inner forearm of a seated person in denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Line art face tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black line drawing of a stylised female face with flowing hair sits on the inner forearm. The linework is thin and continuous, with no shading, and the outline is kept simple with only a few interior details. The subject is cropped at the torso, and the tattoo is set against a black top, pale denim shorts and a white bedspread with a small dark pattern.

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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

Sit closer, the kettle's only just gone off and the lamps on the quay won't last the hour. You want to hear about the girl who drew without lifting her pen. Her name was Nell Harrow, and she worked the night desk at the ferry office on the river, where a man could buy passage to the far bank for a penny and a promise.

Keep reading

Every night the last boat went at eleven, and every night she sat at the window with a stub of carbon pencil and a sheet of cheap paper, drawing whoever had come in out of the rain. She never once lifted the pencil. Not for the eyes, not for the mouth, and the hair she let fall in one long loop off the edge of the page as though the wind had got into it. The foreman called it a trick. The boatmen called it bad luck. Nell only said a face was a single road, and you didn't stop halfway down it to ask directions.

One wet November a stranger came in asking for passage to a shore nobody had heard of. She sat across from him and drew him without his noticing, and when she turned the paper round, the face looking back was her own, the hair running out of the frame and down into the black water. The boatman swore he saw her step aboard. The ledger shows the seat empty all winter.

Her pencil was still lying on the desk, warm to the touch, and the line on the paper had never once come to an end.

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