Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching profile silhouettes on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two outlined profile silhouettes sit on separate forearms, one facing left with a feathered cap over flowing hair and one facing right with hair swept into a bun. The figures are mostly empty outlines, with single fine lines and short strokes of hatching suggesting hair texture. The tattoos are rendered in black ink on a black and white photograph, with the arms placed side by side against a dark top.

Fine line Forearm Profile Silhouette Figure Hair Cap Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The day the Ashdown sisters came in from Whitby, the wind had got into the shop and lifted every sheet of black card off the counter. I chased them across the floorboards with my boot on one corner, and by the time I had them back in order, the younger one had already decided she was a huntsman. She wanted a feather in her cap. I told her a silhouette only keeps what the edge can show, so she would have to make do with a point and a curl of hair. She seemed satisfied with that, which is more than I can say for most sitters.

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A cutter learns to think of the sitter as the thing that is lifted away. You turn the card, you follow the brow and the nose and the chin with the small scissors, and you keep the blade moving so the line never doubles back on itself. The centre you cut out goes into the bin under the counter. Mrs Ashdown paid sixpence for each profile and took them home in a cardboard folder, and I thought no more about the black scraps until the spring after, when I emptied the bin and found the elder sister's bun sitting there, neat as a biscuit.

Thirty years on, a woman with a grown face and her sister's name came in asking for the offcut. I didn't have it. I had only the outlines, pinned to the wall in their frames, two white shapes against the dark, and she stood before them for a long while with her hand flat on the glass, as though she could feel where the hair had been.