Photograph of a realistic colour portrait tattoo of a smiling man with dark curly hair, set against a teal wash, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic colour portrait on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo is a portrait of a smiling man with dark, wavy hair and a lock falling across his forehead, shown from the shoulders up. The face is rendered with soft blended shading, fine detail in the eyes and teeth, and smooth skin-tone gradients. Teal and turquoise watercolour-style washes sit behind the head, and a white collar appears at the bottom of the portrait.

Realism Back Portrait Face Man Curly hair Collar

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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 teal wash had to dry before Ruth could touch the face, and the tin of white on the bench had already skinned over twice. Leon Carrow leaned in the doorway of the van with his shirt open at the throat, grinning like a man who had talked his way out of a parking fine and was rather pleased with himself. "Don't make me look like a waiter," he said. "And the hair. It has to fall where it wants to fall, not where you tell it."

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She had been painting pub boards and pier signs along the Dorset coast for nineteen years, and she knew a sitter who wanted to be flattered from one who wanted to be believed. Leon was the second kind, which made the work harder. She blended the shadow under his cheekbone three times before it stopped looking like dirt. The sea behind him she made the colour of the ballroom's painted ceiling, the one the council had already voted to pull down in March. "Why a board, though?" she asked. "Nobody hangs a portrait on a ballroom wall anymore."

"They'll hang this one on the railings for the last night," he said. "Dancers can look up and see who's going to miss them."

She did the teeth last, because they were the thing everyone looked at first and the thing she could least afford to get wrong. When she finally stepped back, the smile was there, wide and easy, but his eyes had moved a fraction toward the window, where the pier lights were already coming on. She left the collar as a rough white shape, unfinished at the bottom edge, and when the board was carried out into the wet dusk, a gull came down on the varnish and stayed there, pecking at the gleam of the teal.