Close-up photograph of a simple black tattoo of a curved line with four dots, like a minimal face, on the inside of a wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Minimal face with four dots on wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single curved black line sits between two pairs of dots on the inside of a wrist, forming a minimal face. The line is solid and bold, and the dots are small and filled, with the left pair looking slightly blue-black. The plain skin tone and soft, even lighting keep the focus on the small tattoo at the centre of the frame.

Forearm Smiley face Face Dot Curve Line

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 on the Oxford cut would say who had scratched the face into the cabin door of the Pimlico Rose, only that it had been there longer than the paint. Two dots for eyes, two more set a little lower, and one hooked line for a mouth that dragged down like a sack of wet bread. Mum called it a lock-keeper's joke. Dad called it a warning about the weir at Shipton, which he took personally.

Keep reading

I tried to scrub it off every spring with a wire brush and a tin of turps, and every spring it came back, because whoever cut it had gone deeper than the varnish. Old Wilf at Lock Nine reckoned the face belonged to the boat before us, a coal man who sank her in sixty-eight and never laughed again. He said it with his pipe going out, which in Wilf meant he was enjoying himself.

The summer I turned fourteen I stopped scrubbing. I took a fine brush and a pot of black gloss and gave the dots a second coat, then stood on the towpath to check them. From the bank, with the cabin roof cutting across the water, the line did not droop at all. It curved up, a plain smile, and the dots sat on the reflection like two stars that had come out early.

Dad saw it that evening and said nothing, just sat on the step with his tea going cold. Mum still won't say who first carved it. But on still mornings, when the cut is flat enough to hold a reflection, I stand on the bank and let the boat tell me which way up it is.