Black and grey tattoo of a face with wide eyes, a nose and an open mouth on the back of a person's neck and head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open-mouthed face tattoo on the back of neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large face made of two wide-open eyes above a shaded nose and a mouth stretched wide, with visible teeth and tongue. It is rendered in black and grey with soft shading and darker outlines. The photo is taken from behind, framing the design centrally across the back of the neck against a short shaved hairline.

Neck Face Eye Nose Mouth Teeth Tongue

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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

Mrs Abernathy's booth stood at the far end of the Michaelmas field, where the generator hummed louder than the organ, and nobody paid a penny to look at the canvas on the back wall. It was a sheet of tarpaulin painted with one enormous face: two eyes wide as cartwheels, a nose like a pair of cave mouths, and a mouth thrown open as if someone had struck it. The sign above read ONLY THE BRAVE OPEN WIDE. Ada, who had sold toffee apples along the row since June, reckoned it was the only honest thing on the whole fair.

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Her uncle Len had painted it the winter the funfair folded in Ipswich, working by a paraffin lamp in the back of a lorry. He never explained the mouth. When she asked why it was so wide, he said a face with something to shout deserved room to do it, then went back to mixing grey from wood ash and boot black.

On the last night before the fair packed up, the lights failed at half past nine. In the dark a boy came up from the dodgems looking for his mother, and stopped dead in front of the painting. Ada heard him breathe in, slow and careful, the way you do before stepping into cold water. Then, quite softly, he opened his own mouth to match the canvas, and what came out was only a yawn.

The generator coughed back to life. Under the bulb the painted teeth caught the light, and Ada saw that Len had left a single gleam on the tongue, as though the face had just finished laughing at them both.