Realism tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded face with glossy red lips, a red rose at the top and dark branch-like lines below.

Realistic face, red lips and rose on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait tattoo covers the forearm, showing a shaded nose and face with glossy red lips at the centre. A red rose with dark green leaves sits at the top edge, and a crack effect runs across the skin on the left side. Below the lips, dark branch-like lines fade into the lower forearm, and the image is a close, well-lit view against a plain white sleeve.

Realism Forearm Face Lip Rose Nose Leaves Branches

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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

Sit closer, you, and mind that gull eyeing your chips. Up on the harbour wall at Porthlow there was a face painted before my grandmother was born, a woman with her eyes shut and her mouth held just open, as if she'd been about to say something rude to the tide and thought better of it.

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A painter called Tobias Crane came down from Bristol with one tin of red lead and a brush worn to a stump. He gave her lips such a glossy shine that the fishwives swore they were wet at dawn. Nobody knew who she was meant to be. The lime plaster split down the middle that first winter, a crack running from her brow to her chin like a fault line on a chart, and every spring something grew out of the hairline: a red rose, though nobody had ever planted one.

Maud Ferris kept the chandlery at the top of the quay. Her man had gone out past the Ness one October and never come back, and she took to walking the wall each morning to press her palm flat against that crack, as though it were a door she could knock on. The gulls thought she was mad. So did the vicar. But one February the split had widened enough to slide a folded letter into, and Maud did just that, writing down everything she'd never said to him.

Next morning there was a single red petal on the quay stones, bright as a fresh cut. The crack had closed over the letter like a mouth keeping a secret, and the lips went on shining as if they knew exactly what it said.