Realistic colour portrait tattoo of a man with dark curly hair in a red jacket, with a small black silhouette below, on an upper arm.

Realistic colour portrait tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a man with dark, curly hair and a red jacket, looking off to one side, with a small black silhouette of a figure below him against a pale, cloudy sky. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients across the skin tones and fabric. The composition is a vignette that fades into the surrounding skin, with the red jacket and the sky's teal and blue tones giving the piece strong colour contrast.

Realism Upper arm Portrait Man Silhouette Sky Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The red coat had been cut from a bolt of madder cloth that Tomas Ferrer carried over the Col de Sarn in the week the snow came early. Nobody in the valley had seen a coat that colour, and when the toll-keeper's wife asked what he wanted for it, he said only that whoever wore it must be able to walk the pass without looking back.

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Halfway up, where the path shelves above the grey lake, his shadow began to lag. The sun had dropped behind the ridge, yet the shadow stayed on the rock, a black figure bending and straightening as though it had heard a tune nobody else could hear. Tomas stopped. The shadow stopped. When he went on, it followed a half step behind and kept its own time.

At the summit a herd girl named Ilse sat on a boulder with a willow flute. She watched the red coat come over the rise and laughed at the dark thing skittering after it. 'Your shadow wants to dance,' she said. 'Then let it,' said Tomas, and he unbuttoned the coat and laid it on the stones. The shadow stepped out of him onto the pale snow and went on dancing without him, while the coat lay red and empty in the wind.

Ilse played until the light was gone. When the herders came up at dusk they found a girl with a flute, a red coat folded on a rock, and a black figure on the snow that bowed once to the lake and then lay down, flat and still, as shadows do. The people of the valley still cross the pass in red, and they still say you must never walk faster than your own shadow.