Back of a bald man's head with a greyscale tattoo of a wrinkled older man's face, featuring blue eyes, a heavy brow and a moustache, placed across the scalp.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Older man's face tattooed on a bald scalp

Other · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a bald man's head, with a tattooed face of an older man across the scalp. The face has a furrowed brow, deep wrinkles, a broad nose and a drooping moustache, with two vivid blue eyes as the only strong colour. The shading is soft and grey, with the background of a street and buildings out of focus.

Other Face Eye Moustache

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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

Mind the lamp, it spits. You want to know why old Ezra Pike wore his face on the wrong side of his head? I'll tell it true, the way my mother told it to me under the Ferris wheel in Lowestoft, with the generator ticking and the candyfloss man asleep on his sacks.

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Ezra kept the strongbox for the Michaelmas fair, and every autumn some lad tried to lift it while the crowd was watching the strongman. He lost three fingers to a bolt-cutter that way, and his temper went with them. So one spring he walked into a booth on the Kentish Road where a tattooist called Oonagh Quill kept her needles in a biscuit tin. He asked her for an old man's face on the back of his skull. A stern brow, a nose like a fist, a moustache that drooped like wet rope. And eyes. He wanted them blue, bright as a gas flame, so the thieves would know they had been seen.

The thieves never came near him after that. They'd creep up behind with their hands out, and the blue eyes would already be waiting, and the lads would bolt into the dark swearing the thing had turned its head.

The autumn Ezra died, the box was found open and nothing was gone but one ticket stub in the name of Nell, the girl who swept the tents. She was the only one who ever sat behind him to hear his stories. Some say the face had watched her climb in. I say it never once thought to look at who brought him his tea from the front.