Black and grey realism tattoo of a face in a hat with red BAD lettering across the upper arm and shoulder.

Realism portrait with red lettering on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait of a face with a single detailed eye, partly shadowed by a dark hat and smudged black ink. Soft grey shading blends the face into the background, and the bold red word BAD sits beneath the chin. The photo is a close crop of the upper arm and shoulder, with the wearer's face not shown.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Portrait Face Hat Eye Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The salt road had run past Hollin Weir for six generations before anyone thought to ask the man in the grey hat where he was going. He stood on the ferry stage at dusk with one hand on a dead lamp post and a tin box at his feet that ticked when the wind shifted. Dorra Penhallow, who had kept the ferry since her father's knees gave out, told him the crossing was a coin or a song. He said he had no coin, and the only song he had was the one that brought him this far, and he did not care to sing it twice.

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His face was half in shadow under the brim, the way drowned faces looked in the bottom of a rowing boat. Only one eye caught the lantern, pale and steady, and when it turned on the water the water went flat as a plate. Dorra had seen tides argue with men. She had never seen one stop to listen.

"Take me over at the turn," he said. "Nobody will ask you for the fare after."

The boat was called BAD, painted in red down her side, a name her first owners had chosen out of spite for their own mother-in-law. Dorra had never liked the word on the hull, but she had never much liked anything that came up off the salt road either. She pushed off with the pole. Halfway across, the tin box ticked once, twice, and stopped. The stranger opened it and took out nothing at all, only the empty shape of a hat, and set it on his knee.

On the far bank he climbed out, lifted the hat, and set it on the post where the lamp had been. Dorra rowed home in the dark. In the morning the post was bare, the paint on the hull had gone from red to a deep clean black, and when she looked down into the water for the eye, the eye looked back.