Realistic colour portrait tattoo of a man with slicked-back dark hair, blue eyes and a toothy grin, on the upper arm or thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic colour portrait of a man

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large portrait of a man with slicked-back dark hair, blue eyes and a wide, toothy grin, shown in a dark collared shirt against a soft green background wash. The face is rendered with smooth blending, fine skin texture and detailed wrinkles, with the shading built up gradually from warm orange-brown skin tones. The portrait sits centred on the skin, with the edges of the shirt fading into dark shading at the bottom.

Realism Upper arm Portrait Man Face Hair Eye

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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

Arthur Venn wanted his face on the board above the bar of the Drover's Rest, and he wanted it grinning, which was the first problem. I had painted a bishop's nephew and two drowned sailors' widows, and every one of them had had the decency to look as though something hurt. Arthur sat on the low stool by the window, fixed his pale eyes on the canal, and showed me his teeth like a man who had just won a hand he should have lost.

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I mixed the green for the backdrop from the ferry lamps he'd described, a green that wanted to go yellow at the edges if you let it. The skin took longer. I built it glaze by glaze, warm brown over orange over a whisper of red, and every morning Arthur came back and asked me to make the lines around his mouth deeper. I told him the lines were already deeper than his wife liked. He said Hettie had never once looked at his mouth, only his wallet.

When the board went up, the regulars came in to inspect it with their pints. Nobody spoke for a while. Then old Dougie Crane said it was the first time he'd seen Arthur look happy in a painting, and Arthur said he had been happy, once, for about four minutes, on the Halifax ferry, before the engine seized. Nobody knew whether he was joking.

That evening I stayed late and watched the lamp swing over the bar. The light caught the painted eyes before anything else, two blue points that seemed to follow the door. Arthur had been right about the grin. It was the only part of him that never stopped moving.