Fine line tattoo of a woman's face wearing a leaf crown with soft coloured wash, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Line drawn woman in a leaf crown

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's face in a continuous single-line drawing, with long hair falling either side and a crown of leaves on her head. Thin black outlines form the features, hair and crown, while the leaves carry soft pink, yellow, blue and purple wash. The design sits on the inner upper arm against plain skin, with horizontal blinds visible in the background.

Fine line Upper arm Woman Portrait Face Leaves Crown Hair

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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

The rule in the Pardoe kitchen was that the pen never left the paper. Nell learned it at nine from her grandmother, who drew faces on the backs of seed catalogues while the kettle worked up to a boil. You started at the chin, followed the jaw up past the ear, and did not stop until the line came home to where it began. Lifting the nib was cheating. Grandmother called it going to the shops.

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Nell was forty when the bay hedge at the bottom of the allotment went brown with blight and the council sent men with chainsaws. She cut the best of the leaves before they could be burned and carried them up the lane in a feed sack. Her sister Ruth was marrying at the chapel on the Saturday and had asked for only one thing, that someone make her a crown.

Nell drew it on the oilcloth in the grey light before breakfast. The stalk came first, one unbroken stroke, then each leaf fanned out in turn like a hand of cards. The face took three attempts. The hair fell in two long curtains that closed at the bottom into round, heavy ends, and by the time she reached the final curve of the crown she had drawn herself back to the chin without once touching the paper.

On the Saturday Ruth laughed when she saw the design pressed onto her arm, and then went quiet. Nell had brushed watercolour over the leaves, pink and yellow and blue, and in the bright chapel doorway one wash had bled past its outline and crept onto the skin beyond. Grandmother would have called that the good part, the place where the colour refused to stay inside the lines.