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Matching profile portraits on the backs of hands

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows two side-by-side views of the backs of hands, each with a tattoo of a figure in profile facing left. The left design shows a man wearing a layered feathered headdress with a beaded band, and the right shows a woman with long hair, a patterned headband and a single upright feather. Both use soft grey shading and fine dark linework, with highlights on the feathers and hair, and the tattoos are set against lightly shaded skin.

Realism Hand Headdress Feather Profile Portrait Man Woman Hair Headband

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had spent three evenings getting the grey right, mixing black into water until the shadow under each feather looked like it had been there for years. Her brother Tomasz sat on the stool with his hand flat on the table, pretending not to watch. "Facing left," he said, nodding at the sheet. "Like they always look at the boats." She said the profiles had to face the way the Ramsgate ferry pulled out, because that was the way their father had gone, and nobody had ever told them which way he came back.

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The drawing had come from a biscuit tin under the sink in their mother's flat: two heads in profile, pencilled on the back of a shipping invoice, one with a band tied tight across the brow, the other with hair falling loose to the shoulder. Nell had photocopied it at the library, traced it onto acetate, and spent a week in the back room above the chip shop learning to lift the highlights without losing the lines. Her hands ached by Thursday.

On the last afternoon Tomasz asked if she could darken the crown of the hair, so it looked wet from the rain off the harbour. She said that was the whole trick: leave the white of the skin alone and let the black do the work. When she was done, the two sheets sat side by side on the glass counter, both turned towards the window and the grey water beyond.

He held his hand up to the light for a long time. "He'd have got the feather wrong," he said. "Good," said Nell, and reached for the wipes.