Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile of minarets and clouds on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A profile of a face, drawn as a network of dots joined by fine lines, sits along the side of the torso. Inside the outline, a realistic mosque with tall minarets rises through shaded clouds, and flying birds appear at the top left. The work uses soft grey shading for the building and hair, contrasted with sharp black dots and thin linework, and it is entirely in black and grey ink.

Realism Geometric Dotwork Ribs Face Profile Cloud Bird Hair Line Dot Sky

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

Nasra was halfway up the scaffold on the north minaret when the starlings came in off the harbour, thick as smoke, and hung at the height of her shoulder as though they had been sent for her. Below, the masons were arguing about the lime. Above, the sky was still daylight blue, which was the trouble. Her grandmother used to say that the stars never left the sky, they only waited behind the day for someone patient enough to join them.

Keep reading

Nobody in Qalat Hadid had been patient enough for the minarets. The builders had finished the walls, the arches and the dome, but the old men said the mosque would not stand until someone had drawn the face of the sky onto its wall. So Nasra borrowed a reed pen and a pot of soot-black ink from the stall at the foot of the steps, and on the courtyard plaster she began to map the dusk. A dot, then a thread, then another dot. The starlings followed her hand from one point to the next.

She worked until the lamps were lit. Her lines ran from brow to chin, over a cheekbone of hard light, and when she reached the jaw the grey wash from the chandler's tin spread across the plaster by itself, soft and slow, like weather coming in, until the minarets stood up out of the cloud. The masons came to look and went quiet. One of them said the face had been expected for three hundred years.

Nasra climbed down before the cloud could take her. In the morning the scaffold was gone, and the birds had settled along the tallest spire in a neat black row, each one looking back down at the courtyard as if it had been counted.