Fine line tattoo of a woman's face with flowers in her hair, placed on the forearm, shown in black ink.

Line drawn woman with flowers on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous-looking black outline of a woman's face, with a stylised profile of her hair and small flowers tucked into it, runs up the forearm. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the simplified, angular features echo modernist line drawing. The tattoo is in black ink only and sits centred on the forearm against a dark background, with a pair of denim shorts visible at the left edge of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Woman Face Flower Hair Portrait Line drawing

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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

Mrs Okonedo on the eleventh floor never lifted her pen from the paper. That was the first thing I learned about her, the summer I moved into Calder House and got stuck in the lift between the ninth and tenth floors with her and a carrier bag of onions. She didn't apologise for the smell. She was drawing on the back of a council letter, one unbroken line, and when the lift jolted she carried on as if the jolt had been part of the picture.

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She drew faces, mostly neighbours, mostly from memory. You only needed one line, she said, if you were willing to get the nose wrong. Her own face she had attempted forty times and never once got the eyes to agree. Flowers were the hard part. Flowers wanted to be left alone, and a pen made them nervous, so she gave them only a few strokes and trusted the hair to hold them in place.

When the block was scheduled for demolition, the council gave us six weeks. I found her on the stairwell the last Friday, the drawing taped to a wall where the paint had gone the colour of weak tea. It climbed from the skirting board to the height of my shoulder, a single line that swept around a face, looped through a head of hair and caught three small blooms on the way down. Beneath it, in pencil, she had written: Keep the line, lose the rest.

I took the sheet down before the men with the hoarding arrived. Mrs Okonedo had gone to her sister's in Peckham by then, and I never got to ask her whether the face was her own. I keep it folded in my coat now, and on the bus I sometimes follow the line with my finger, lifting it only at the end, where she would have stopped.