Realism tattoo of a large-eyed doll face with freckles and grey bob hair across the back of a hand.

Realistic doll face on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Colour · Photo

A close-up of a doll face tattooed across the back of a hand, with large blue eyes, dark lashes, freckles and a closed-lip red mouth. Grey hair frames the face and pink hair shows at the top edge of the image. The shading is smooth and soft, with detailed highlights in the eyes and gradual tonal changes across the skin.

Realism Hand Doll Face Eye Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doll arrived on the Tuesday train in a hatbox, wrapped in last week's Eastern Daily Press. Mr Gell carried it into the back room as if it might wake. Its eyes were the blue of a gas flame, large and wet, and someone had dotted freckles across its nose one at a time with a fine brush, the way you'd sprinkle pepper on an egg.

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Dad said the eyes were German, sent over before the war, and that the glue had gone to crumbs. My job was to lay the little hands out on newspaper and count the freckles so we could match any that had flaked. Forty-one. I counted them twice because I liked the number, and the second count came to forty-one again, though I was sure I had seen one more on the cheek when the light came through the window.

Mrs Ashby came for it on the Friday. She did not look at the face. She tucked the doll under one arm, asked whether the mouth had been touched, and when I said no she nodded as though I had passed a test. At the door she said her daughter used to sit in the front window with it, watching the lane for a boy who had gone to Korea and never written back. The doll had kept watch better than the girl ever did, she said, because the girl had learned to stop looking.

After the bell stopped ringing, I took the finest brush from the tin, dipped it in rust-brown paint and added one more freckle to the doll's cheek, just below the left eye, where the light would catch it. Then I put the brush back and wiped my hands, and I did not tell Dad, because some repairs are only ever half finished.