Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile silhouette on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person with short dark hair, seen from behind, wears a purple sleeveless top and rests one hand on their shoulder. The tattoo is a solid black silhouette of a head in profile, with the hair gathered up, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade. It uses only black ink with smooth, unshaded edges against plain pale skin and a pale green wall.

Back Silhouette Profile Head Hair bun Woman

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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

Sit yourself down by the stove, and keep your hands off the scissors, for they were my father's and they bite. You want to know how the Pell trade began. It began with a bun of hair and a boy who would not sit still.

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Mrs Abel came up the pier steps one wet March with her Thomas beside her, twelve years old and wriggling like an eel. She wanted him cut before the Hull packet took him on as a cabin boy. I told her a silhouette wants a still head, so I sat him on the stool and turned his face to the candle. He fidgeted. I snipped along the edge of his cheek where the light caught it, and he swore I'd cut his nose clean off. I had not. I had cut the line of him sharp as a gull's wing, with the hair he'd tied up that morning for his mother's sake, gathered into a knot at the back of his skull.

Thomas never came back for his card. The packet went down off Flamborough with all hands, and a month later his mother climbed the steps again and pressed a question into my palm like a coin. Could I cut him a second, so she might keep one and send one to his uncle in Leeds? I told her I could not. Paper will not hold a fidget twice, and the second would never be the first.

So I pasted the card in the shop window, where the sun could come through it. It's still there, behind the glass by the door, with the hair up and the face turned to the sea. Nobody in Margate has asked me to cut another head since. Some faces you keep by cutting them once, and you do not get to cut them again.