Realistic colour tattoo of a woman resting her head on a pillow, with red lips and curled blonde hair, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic colour portrait of a woman on a pillow

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman with curled blonde hair and red lips, resting her head on a pillow with an arm bent across the top of the image. Smooth, detailed shading and natural skin tones give it a photographic look, with the pillow rendered in soft cream and grey. A black wire-like band with fine linework wraps around the arm near the lower edge of the design.

Realism Upper arm Woman Portrait Wire Blonde 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 photograph came over the border at Sorin Bridge folded inside a feather pillow, which is why the sniffer dog walked straight past it. I found it because the seam had been sewn with black thread, and black thread on cream cotton is the first thing a bored customs clerk learns to notice. My job that year was to open such things and write them down in a ledger. Nobody had warned me the pillow would have a woman sleeping on it.

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She lay with her curls pressed flat against the linen and her mouth painted the red of a stop sign, one arm folded beneath her cheek as if the afternoon had simply run out on her. Someone had drawn a thin band of barbed wire around her wrist in pencil, very carefully, the way a child draws a bracelet. On the back, in a neat hand, it said: Ilse, Brno, 1961. Do not let them keep it.

I should have stamped the form and called my supervisor. Instead I put the pillow under my arm, drove it across myself the next morning in my own coat, and told the guard at the far post that I had nothing he would find interesting. He looked at me for a long moment, then at the pillow, then back at me, and waved me through without a word. The photograph stayed folded in the lining of that coat for the rest of the winter.

I never learned what became of Ilse. Thirty years later I framed the picture and hung it in the hallway, and visitors always ask who the sleeping woman is. I tell them she got out before the wire went up. It is the only true thing I say at parties.