Black and grey realism tattoo of a man with curly hair above the quote 'This is the strangest life I've ever known' on a lower leg.

Portrait and quote on a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey portrait of a man with voluminous curly hair and a light shirt collar sits above a line of small serif text reading 'This is the strangest life I've ever known.' The portrait uses dense shading for hair and soft tonal gradients for the face, with a few sketchy dark marks flanking the design. The photo is taken straight on against a bedspread, and the skin texture is visible throughout.

Realism Calf Portrait Man Curly hair Necklace Quote

Find an artist for this

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

The ovens at Hale's had been running since half three when Marjorie Penhale dropped a tray of rye on the marble and declared the bread wrong. I said it looked fine. She held a loaf up against the black window as if checking it for a flaw in the glass. "It's the strangest thing," she said. "It proves just as well in the cold as in the warm, and I can't tell you why."

Keep reading

She had been baking nights since before my mother was born, and she talked to dough the way other women talk to cats. Her shop sat under a railway arch on Coldharbour Lane. Each morning at four she took a brown paper bag from her coat pocket and slid out a creased photograph of a man with a mass of dark curls and an open collar, looking at something beyond the edge of the frame. Underneath, in biro and her round hand, she had written: this is the strangest life I've ever known. She never explained it. She tucked it under the lid of the flour bin and got on with the day.

The winter the council shut the arch for drains, we moved the bakery into a church hall that smelled of damp hymnals. The bread came out flat for a fortnight. On the fifteenth morning I found her on an upturned crate with the photograph on her knee, crying without any fuss. "Thirty years I've wondered if I was getting it wrong," she said. "Turns out the flour was fine. The hall was wrong. I was too stubborn to see it."

We set out the rolls at five while the sun came up grey over the car park. She folded the paper back into her pocket and patted it twice. "Strange life," she said, and went to light the second oven.