Black and grey realism tattoo of a moustached man's face covering the back of a hand, with a second face-like shape above the knuckles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moustached man portrait on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large portrait of a man with a thick, curled moustache covers the back of the hand, with a single eye and the nose and moustache placed over the knuckles. A second face-like shape in profile appears at the top of the hand near the wrist, and the fingers carry smaller dotted and patterned details. The shading is smooth and grey against dark skin, with a plain black background behind the hand.

Realism Hand Portrait Man Moustache Face Eye

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 had lived in Harrowmere Keep since the roof went in 1931, so when damp came through the north stair I expected rot, not a face. The plaster had split along a crack the width of my thumb, and behind it, grey as lead, a man looked out at me with one open eye. His moustache swept up at both ends like the handlebars of a bicycle my father once owned. Someone had painted him with a patience I did not expect from a country that had been burning its own houses for six hundred years.

Keep reading

Mrs Ashdown from the parish council wanted it photographed and then sealed. I wanted to know who he was. The estate ledgers named every steward back to the Restoration and not one of them had a moustache worth the name. In the chapel vestry I found a cracked case with a pressed daisy inside and a scrap of paper that read only 'for the one who came back, he kept his word.' I stood holding it in the cold until the light slid off the flagstones.

The second face came up on the stair two nights later, in profile, pressed close to the first as if the pair of them were sharing a joke about the weather. I took a rubbing with charcoal and brown paper, and by morning the lines had doubled. Somebody had been painting, or somebody had been remembering. I told Mrs Ashdown the wall was sound. I still do not know whether I was lying to protect the keep or the man in it.

In April I scraped the plaster back to the lath and found only brick, and beneath the grime a smear of dark ochre where a thumb had rested. Whoever painted him had used the wall the way you would use a palm to steady yourself on a ladder. I pressed my own hand flat against the stone, and it was warm."