Black and grey realism portrait tattoo of a young boy with curly hair and a tank top, placed on the upper arm.

Realism portrait of a young boy

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic portrait of a young boy with voluminous curly hair, a downturned mouth and a pensive expression, wearing a ribbed sleeveless top. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients across the face and hair and a dark, blurred background behind the head that frames the figure. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and sits centrally on the skin, with fine stippled texture visible across the surrounding skin.

Realism Upper arm Portrait Child Face Curly hair

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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

The woman who brings the boy to your bench wants the dark taken out of the background. "Lift the shadow," she says, "he looks like he's standing in a hole." You tell her the halo is the point. Dust still clings to the glass, and under the lamp the curls seem to rise out of the print as if heat were pushing them up.

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The boy is pouting, or pretending to, his lower lip pushed out and his brows drawn together at something just beyond the edge of the picture. The ribbed vest has frayed at one shoulder where someone once hooked a finger through it to pull him back from a kerb. You know this because she tells you, then admits she made it up on the tram. You let her keep it.

Restoring takes three nights. On the second you find, under a fleck of mould beside his ear, a pencil mark no bigger than a grain of rice: four upright strokes and a slash. Someone was counting something in this room, days perhaps, the way sailors and prisoners count, or days until a train came back.

On the third night you leave the dark exactly as it was and hang the print facing the east window, where the first grey light off the reservoir comes in. The boy frowns at the glass as though the sun were late and he has decided not to forgive it. You copy the tally into the margin in your own hand, and because nobody else will ever read it, you add one more stroke.