Colour realism tattoo of red lips parting around a brass .357 SIG bullet casing, with grey smoke curling from the mouth, on a section of skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lips with bullet casing and smoke

Realism · Colour · Photo

A pair of red lips is open to show a brass bullet casing stamped with 357 SIG, with grey smoke trailing out from the corners and top of the mouth. The lips and smoke are shaded with smooth gradients and highlights, giving a realistic, three-dimensional finish. The design fills the frame on plain skin with bright, saturated ink.

Realism Lip Smoke Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house on Cley Row had one rule pinned above the stairs in Mrs Pell's copperplate: no quarrels after the lamps are lit. Nobody kept it better than Ada Greave, who took the back room in March with a trunk, a cough and a brass cartridge wrapped in a handkerchief.

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She would not say where the cartridge came from. She only said that a thing fired once could not be unfired, and that words were the same. Mrs Pell, who had buried two husbands and liked a tidy ledger, took her at her word and let her eat alone. Each evening Ada sat at the window turning the cartridge in her palm until the numbers on its base caught the last of the light. She pressed her lips together whenever the landlord's son called the fish cold or the vicar's wife called the sea a thief.

In the second week of September a gale came in off the Wash and took the cliff steps down to the beach. The lodgers gathered in the hall with candles, and Ada stood up in the middle of them. Everyone waited for the sentence they had all been dreading for months. She opened her mouth, and out came a grey thread of smoke that curled past the coat hooks and the barometer and under the ceiling roses, and then nothing else at all.

Mrs Pell swore afterwards that the smoke smelled of gunpowder and salt. The gale dropped by morning. Ada was gone, the back room swept, and on the sill lay the cartridge, bright as a coin, numbers facing the window. Mrs Pell kept it on the mantel and never once asked anyone to hold their tongue.