Colour portrait tattoo on a calf showing a man with dark hair in a red top holding a red-haired child in a teal outfit with pink hearts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Portrait of a man and child on a calf

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A large portrait tattoo on the lower leg shows a man with long dark hair and a red top holding a young child with red hair. The child wears a teal outfit patterned with pink hearts and is held against the man's chest. The painted style uses soft shading and blended skin tones, with the figures set against the surrounding skin and a dark background in the photograph.

Realism Other Portrait Man Child Red hair Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern called for teal, and Mrs Okafor's bolt of poplin came in the wrong shade, a green-grey like the sea off Scarborough in February. I cut it anyway. Pink hearts were the one thing the theatre and I agreed on, so I stitched forty of them by hand over three nights, each one a little lopsided because my left eye has never forgiven me for the cataract.

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Dennis Fairclough came to the fitting room on the Thursday with his grandson clamped against his hip like a sack of coal. The boy had hair the colour of a rusted kettle and refused to lift his arms. Dennis said the troupe were leaving on Saturday and the lad had outgrown everything he owned. I told him children always outgrow things. It is the only dependable thing about them.

I let the seams out twice before the boy would stand still for the hem. He wanted the hearts counted aloud, and when he reached thirty-eight he lost his place and began again at one, which I took as a fair sign the suit was his.

They left on the Saturday in a van with a cracked windscreen. Eleven years later a postcard came from Morecambe with no return address, just the sands on the front and a single pink heart drawn in biro on the back. There was a button in the envelope too, teal, one of mine, the one I had sewn on crooked. It sits on my pincushion now, beside the pins I never found a use for.