Black and grey realistic portrait tattoo of a woman with curled hair and a cigarette, with ornamental sleeve designs on her arms, on a person's left side ribs.

Realistic black and grey portrait on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman with curled hair resting her hand near her face, holding a cigarette, with ornamental patterns and script lettering across her arms. The portrait is rendered with smooth shading and soft tonal gradients, with fine detail in the hair and facial features. The design is set against a dark shadowed background and wraps across the curve of the ribs.

Realism Ribs Portrait Woman Cigarette Hand Script Shadow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell had been retouching negatives at Harrow and Vane since the war, and she knew a face could be argued with. On Thursday the agency wanted a starlet's wave softened by a quarter inch and the mouth made less knowing. Ada worked with a sharp pencil on the glass, lifting shadow from the cheek with the flat of her thumb, while the wireless played dance music too loudly through the wall.

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The new girl, Joan, brought tea and a cigarette she had not lit. "They want her to look like she's never been cross," Joan said. Ada didn't answer. She had seen the proof sheets: a woman propping her chin on one hand at a bar, a folded telegram in the other, and down her forearm a line of copperplate that no printer in Soho could match. The studio had told the press the lettering was a code. Ada knew better. It was a name, spelled wrong on purpose so that nobody else could read it.

That evening she stayed late, the lamp hot against her wrist. She fixed the brow and the lids and the stray curl over the ear, and she left the mouth exactly as it was, because the mouth was the only honest thing on the sheet. She slid the negative into her coat pocket and walked home past the bombed chapel, where the pigeons gathered in the lee of the wall.

On Monday the agency rang to say the retouch had come back. Too cheerful, they said. Joan took the call, looked at Ada across the darkroom, and pinned the print to the corkboard by the door, where the one uncorrected line of the face kept its quiet.