Realism colour tattoo on a forearm showing a red lipstick tube with a silver MAC case beside a red lip print kiss mark.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lipstick and kiss mark on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A photograph of a colour tattoo on the inner forearm showing a realistic lipstick tube with a red bullet, silver collar and black base, with the word MAC printed on the silver case. A red lip print kiss mark sits to the right, and a soft shadow appears beneath the lipstick base. The shading is smooth and the colours are rich, with a background of a workspace and a striped cloth at the left edge.

Realism Forearm Lipstick Kiss

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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

Sit under the awning and mind the drip, because the rain has been coming off the stalls since Tuesday and the Thursday market never dries out. You want the story of the red stick in the tin on Ruth Dacre's trestle? Then listen, for I'll tell it only once before the lamps go out. Ruth sold lipsticks, pins and cheap combs from a tray under a green umbrella, and one wet morning a stick of red rolled off the edge, bounced once on the cobbles and came to rest against a puddle as if it had been waiting for a customer.

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Gil Brannock the tinsmith picked it up. He had a letter to write to a singer at the Crown, a woman called Sadie Lowe, and wax was dear in the rain and he had no money for a proper seal. So he pressed the red stick to the bottom of the page, the way a man might press a stamp, and left a mark as clear as a bell. He folded it, licked the corner, and sent it off with the boy who swept the bins.

Sadie wrote back on the back of a playbill. Her reply was four words long and she signed it with the same red, so that the post office clerk swore she had sent a warning. Gil kept both letters in his coat for forty years, and they say the stick was never returned, because nobody on the market ever claimed a thing that had made two people so happy.

Ruth still keeps the stub in her tin, worn down to a finger's length, its black base scuffed grey. Some mornings when the rain thins, she sets it upright on the tray and the light makes a small shadow beneath it, like a dog that has come back from a long walk and will not sit down.