Black and grey realistic tattoo of a lipstick tube with MAC lettering on a finger, beside a red painted nail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lipstick tube tattoo on a finger

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a finger carrying a black and grey tattoo that shows a lipstick tube with the letters MAC printed across it. The shading gives the tube a rounded, metallic look with fine ridged lines along its length. The red painted nail and the pale skin of the surrounding fingers contrast with the dark ink, and a partly visible tattoo sits on the other hand at the top left.

Realism Hand Lipstick Finger Nail polish

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

Nobody under the railway arch believed Ada Penhallow when she swore the tube had been in her apron pocket for three days before it started to hum. She sold face paint and pomade from a barrow on Tanner's Row, and she knew every brass case in her tray by its weight and the small dent on its lid. This one had no dent. It had only the word VEL stamped down its length, the letters as fine as hair, and a red so deep it looked wet.

Keep reading

The first customer was a travelling clerk called Mr Orrin, who came down the Row every Thursday with his collar starched to cardboard. He wanted the shade for his wife, who had died in the spring, and he asked Ada to show him how to wind it up. She turned the base, and the red rose slowly out of the case like a bell rope taking up its slack. He stood a long while looking at it. Then he said it was the colour she had worn to their wedding, and he walked off without paying, and that was the last Ada saw of him.

The tube came back to the barrow the next morning, lying on the counter where she had not left it. Every customer after that went home with a red mouth they had not asked for, and every one of them came back a week later to say the colour would not wash off. Ada kept it locked in the tin with the spare keys, but the lid never stayed shut. Some nights she heard it turning against the tin, patient as a clock.

In the end she gave it away to the one person on the Row who never once asked for anything, a girl who swept the arches and ate her bread standing up. Ada watched her roll the case between finger and thumb, the ridges catching the lamp light. The girl laughed, pressed the base once, and said it fit her better than anything she had owned. Ada has not sold a lipstick since.