Black fine line tattoo of a stylised face with an eye and lips across the finger of a hand, placed on the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Line-drawn face and eye on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with a small tattoo of a stylised face in continuous black line art, with a single eye and a pair of lips along one finger. The linework is thin and even with no shading, and the design is in black ink only. The hand is against a dark wooden panel, with the finger tattoo centred in the frame.

Fine line Hand Face Eye Lip Line art

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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

Now you'll want to know how Bessie Quarrell drew a face without lifting her pen, because that's the part the sailors never believed. She sat on the quay at Mevagissey with a bottle of ink and a sheet of cheap paper, and she'd say, don't you blink, my love, because if you blink I've lost you.

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The captain of the Hesper Lane came down the gangway one wet March and paid her a shilling to draw his wife, who had sailed with him for twenty years and never once sat still for a portrait. Bessie set the nib at the corner of the woman's brow and ran one black line down past the cheek, over the lips, and back up into the eye. Eighteen seconds, the mate counted. Not one bump or tremble in the line.

The captain looked at it a long while and said nothing. He folded the paper into his coat and sailed on the evening tide, and his wife, who had stayed home with the baby, never came down to the quay to see it. Bessie kept her ink pot and her pen, and every fisherman who asked got a single line for a penny, nothing more.

The Hesper came back in October with no captain aboard, only his coat, and the paper still folded in its pocket. The mate said the man had stood at the wheel all the way home staring at the water as if something down there were staring back. Bessie unfolded the sheet on her knee. The single eye was open. The lips had been drawn shut. Ask me what it means and I'll tell you the drawing never lied, only the sea did.