Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman's face with wavy hair on the outer thigh, with the wearer lying down in socks.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic female portrait tattoo on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large portrait of a woman's face with flowing, wavy hair is tattooed across the outer thigh. The face is shaded in soft greys with fine detail in the eyes, lips and hair, and the hair fades into lighter shading toward the edge of the design. The skin is bare, and the wearer is lying on a cushion with patterned socks and purple boots visible in the background.

Realism Thigh Portrait Woman Face Hair Lip Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy kept the photograph of the singer in a biscuit tin under the counter of the Pier Street studio, and nobody touched it but Tom. He was the retoucher, the one who sat under a magnifying lamp with a fine brush and took the lines off fishermen's faces before their wives saw them. The woman in the print had come in off the Thursday boat in 1938, wanting a portrait for a man who never collected it, and she had let her hair go to the wind on purpose. Tom said it was the finest hair he had ever been asked to keep.

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The trouble started in February, when sea fog sat on the harbour for three days and the lamp kept failing. Tom noticed the curls had shifted. Not much. A wave that had rolled left now rolled right, as if a draught had got into the paper. He mentioned it to Mrs Abernethy, who said silver prints did that in damp and he should go home to his tea.

On the fourth night the fog lifted and the harbour lights came on one by one. Tom opened the tin and saw that the mouth had softened, half a shade warmer than the rest of the face, as though someone behind it had started humming. He reached for the brush, meaning to put it right, then stopped. The eyes had turned. They were looking past him now, through the shop window, down the slipway to where the last boat was coming in.

Tom left the brush where it lay. In the morning he found the tin open and the print propped against the till, facing the sea, and the curls laid flat and dry as if they had never once been out in the weather.