Grey and colour portrait tattoo on a calf showing a short-haired man in a shirt and tie behind a cracked mask of a second face with a bruised eye.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Portrait and cracked mask on a calf

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a man with short hair, wearing a shirt and tie, with a second face overlaid on his. The second face is a cracked mask with a goatee and a purple and red bruise around one eye. The portrait uses soft grey shading and bold black outlines, with red and purple wash accents. The design is centred on the calf and fills most of the frame against plain skin and a white sheet.

Realism Neo-trad Other Portrait Man Face Mask Suit Tie

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, and mind the hearth, because this is a long one and my knees are no longer fit for standing. It concerns Harold Pryce, who kept the wages book at Ashgrove Colliery for twenty-two years and wore a collar and tie every day of them, even in the pit yard, where the coal dust turned the knot grey by dinnertime.

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Harold kept two faces. The first was the one Mr Lockyer liked, a neat, trim-bearded, agreeable face that nodded at the figures and never asked where the fourpence had gone. Behind it lived the other man, the one who had to write down the names of the men who did not come up in the cage. Folk said the agreeable face was a mask, but Harold knew it was the only thing holding the second one together.

Then came the February that Owen Tanner, a trammer with four children, found his pay short by three shillings. He came to the wages window and asked, and Harold, who had signed the sheet himself, said the book was the book. Owen struck him once across the face, then stood there shaking, sorry before the blow had finished landing. Harold went home with a purple ring round one eye and told his wife he had walked into the pit-head door, and she, being sensible, believed him for a week.

The next Monday he took the mask off in front of the whole office. He opened the ledger, wrote every shilling owed in plain ink, and let the cracks run right across his agreeable face. Ashgrove still tells it that the pay came right that week, and that the mask lies in a drawer at the pit office to this day, split clean down the middle, like a seam nobody bothered to mend.