Line drawn face and wing on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A single black line drawing shows a face in profile, with a simple lip detail, alongside a sweeping wing or leaf-like outline. The linework is thin and uniform with no shading, and the ink is the only colour against the skin. The tattoo sits on the upper thigh, cropped at the top of the frame, with sunglasses and denim in the foreground.

Fine line Thigh Face Profile Wing Lip Line drawing

Find an artist for this

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

The gull first appeared on the wheelhouse door of the Mary Ellen in the week the herring stopped running. Nobody saw Dessie Carr draw it. He was a quiet deckhand from Whitby who spent his watches sketching on the backs of fish-ticket receipts, and when the skipper found the design taped to the galley hatch, a single black line curling from a profile face into a wing, he only grunted and asked who had lost a pencil.

Keep reading

Dessie wouldn't say where the face came from. He said it belonged to the woman who sold tea at the Scarborough harbour kiosk, though she had never had a face like that, all thin nose and one small mouth, looking off past the breakwater. The crew argued about it across three weeks of empty nets. Ruth, the cook, reckoned it was a selkie, which was rubbish, because selkies don't have wings. Old Tam said it was a kittiwake with ideas above its station.

The turn came off Flamborough on a Thursday, when the swell lifted us high enough to see the cliffs go white with birds. The net came up light and then heavy all at once, and in the tangle was a dinghy someone had lost years back, its name worn to nothing and a gull painted on the transom in the same unbroken line. Dessie stood at the rail with his hands in his pockets and did not look surprised at all.

He never drew another thing on the boat. The gull stayed on that door until the Mary Ellen went to the breakers in the spring, and I still carry the receipt he drew on, folded in my wallet, one line running from the chin to the tip of that wing, with the eye left open.