Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an ornate masked face with peacock feathers and paisley motifs across an upper arm and shoulder.

Ornate masked face on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo shows a face partly covered by an ornate mask, with a closed eye, full lips and dense swirling filigree. Peacock-style feathers, pearl-like beads and paisley motifs surround the face, built from stippled dots and fine lines with soft grey shading. The design wraps across the shoulder and upper arm, and the image is shown in black and grey.

Dotwork Fine line Upper arm Shoulder Mask Face Feather Peacock feather Paisley Bead Filigree Eye Lip Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta had been promised the mask would take a single winter, and it had taken two. Her grandmother's carving knife lay on the bench beside the lamp, its handle worn pale where a hundred hands had gripped it. Past the back wall of the village the pines began, dark and close, and the children were forbidden to cross the stile after dusk.

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The mask was for the Lantern Walk, when everyone who owned a face of carved wood carried it out to meet whatever kept the edge of the trees. Marta had cut the brow into ridges of scrollwork, pricking the hollows with a bradawl so each little pit caught the lamplight. She had looped paisley swirls across the cheeks like the ones on her mother's Sunday shawl. Then came the feathers. Three peacock eyes, bought from the squire's gamekeeper for a month of eggs, were pressed into the wood so they seemed to watch from the temples.

On the eve of the walk a woman came to the bench, grey hair pinned with a string of pearls, and asked to see the work. She turned the mask in her hands and smiled at the closed eye, the one carved with a single pale bead at its centre. "It will not open," she said, "until someone looks through it." Marta took the mask back and pressed it face down on the bench. When she turned around, the woman had gone, and the pearls lay in a neat ring on the floorboards.

At dusk Marta carried the mask past the stile with the others. The lanterns bobbed ahead of her into the pines, and the feathers clicked against the wood with every step. Somewhere up the path a branch cracked, the bead in the closed eye caught the light, and the lid of it lifted, very slowly, to show her what had been waiting to look back.