Black and grey portrait tattoo on a forearm and upper arm, with knuckle lettering on the fingers and hand, photographed on a woman in a dark speckled t-shirt.

Portrait and lettering tattoos on hand and arm

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a dark speckled t-shirt rests her tattooed hand at her hip, with lettering across the knuckles and fingers. The forearm and upper arm carry a realistic black and grey portrait style design, and a larger shaded tattoo sits on the back of the hand. The soft white background and natural light keep the focus on the ink, and the printed slogan on the shirt is not part of the tattoo work.

Realism Lettering Hand Forearm Upper arm Portrait Lettering Knuckle Hand Forearm Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate had been ruined twice before Edie Marsh would let anyone touch it. It was copper, rolled thin as a biscuit, with a face half drawn in graphite across its surface and the sitter's brow already cut. Her father had taught her to hold the burin at the angle a barber holds a razor, and to breathe out before every stroke so the hand would not tremble on the line.

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The commission came from a widow in Walsall who wanted her husband's likeness for the lid of a pocket watch. He had died at the pit head in the spring. She brought a photograph so creased it had been folded into quarters and pressed flat again, and she asked for the eyes to be darker than the photograph showed, because that was how she remembered them. Edie told her she could not make a dark eye out of a bright one without lying to the metal.

Each night she worked by a single gas jet, cross-hatching shadow into the cheek until the face seemed to lean out of the copper. On the third night the lines began to break up under the glass, and she understood that the bite of the acid had got under the varnish. She stopped, washed the plate in weak nitric, and started the cheek again from the beginning, counting her strokes aloud the way her father had counted them.

When the widow came back she turned the lid to the window and was quiet for a long time. Then she asked whether there was room on the back for a word, and Edie cut the letters small and even along the rim: only his name, and beneath it the date he had gone down. The widow paid in coins still warm from her hand. Edie kept the spoiled first plate on the sill, where it catches the light, its half-finished cheek turned up like something that would not be finished.