Black and grey portrait tattoo of a man's face with lettering below it, on the inside of a forearm.

Portrait and quote on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black portrait of a man's face with short, swept hair fills the upper part of the forearm, rendered in bold contrast with smooth shading and heavy solid areas. Below the portrait, thin black lettering reads Dream as if you and Live forever, partly cropped at the edge. The photo is taken straight on against a dark background, with the ink as the dominant feature.

Realism Lettering Forearm Portrait Man Face Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the bells at Saint Ebba's on the wet hill above the mere, and for forty winters he rang them for other people's funerals. The abbot said he had a voice like a cracked jug, and that was why he got the bells. Nobody asked him to dream.

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One October a travelling tinker came up the track with a cart of pots and a boy who was no use with either. The tinker asked for lodging and paid in a copper pan. In the morning the boy was gone, and so was the lid of the pan, and Anselm found a face scratched into the wet plaster of the bell tower wall, the hair swept back as if wind had got into it. Beneath it someone had written Dream as if you in careful letters, and the rest had been scraped out by the rain.

The abbot wanted it whitewashed. Anselm did not. He sat under it each evening with his bread and cold tea, and he began to talk to the face the way you talk to a man who has nothing to say back. He told it about the mere freezing over and the price of tallow. The face kept its counsel.

In the spring the tinker came back, alone, and stood at the foot of the tower with his cap in his hands. "The boy drew that," he said. "He said it would keep you company. He said you'd know what the rest of it meant." Anselm climbed the stair, laid his palm flat on the wall beside the face, and rang the small bell once, for no funeral at all.