Black moustache tattoo with curled ends and shaded hatching on the upper arm, below a pale sleeve, against a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moustache tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black moustache with curled ends sits on the outer upper arm, just below the hem of a pale short sleeve. The shape is filled with fine shaded lines that suggest individual hairs and give it a little depth. The background is a blurred brick wall in muted greys, so the tattoo is the clear focus of the frame.

Upper arm Moustache Swirl

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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

Mr Ashdown wanted the moustache doubled before the sitter's sister arrived on the four o'clock train, so Edith sat at the retouching desk with the negative held to the north window and a sable brush no thicker than a hair. The plate showed a man who had died of a fever in March, and the family had paid in advance for him to look as he had at the Whitsun fair, when he had been proud of his whiskers.

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She had never been allowed to draw a moustache before. Ashdown said a lady's hand was too careful for a gentleman's vanity, so she had spent two years lightening freckles and removing the odd stray eyelash. Now she worked the curl outward from the lip in long strokes, then shaded the underside with hatching so fine it would only show when the print was held to the light, each line a single hair the man had never grown in life.

The sister came in her black gloves and studied the proof for a long time. Edith waited for the word that would mean the job was wrong. Instead the woman touched the glass, very lightly, over the left curl, and said that was exactly how he used to twist it when he was thinking.

Edith went home that evening with graphite on her cuffs and the strange feeling that she had given a stranger back a habit. Ashdown never asked her to retouch a moustache again, though he kept the proof in the drawer under the desk, and some nights she took it out and held it up to the window to count the hairs.