Colour realism tattoo of red lips with tongues showing on a man's upper arm, with a third partial mouth at the edge of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic lips with tongues on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Three red lips with open mouths and orange tongues are tattooed across the upper arm, shown in a realistic, shaded style. The lips have soft highlights and dark shadows, and the tongues show glossy colour gradients. The photograph is taken outdoors against greenery, with the arm filling most of the frame and a partial view of the wearer's jaw at the top.

Realism Upper arm Lip Mouth Tongue

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivy Marr was asked to paint one mouth on the fortune booth at the end of the pier and painted three, because her father used to say a single mouth tells lies but a crowd of them gets the truth out eventually. She mixed the tongues from marigold and a drop of cadmium, since the pier lamps turned everything the colour of marmalade once the sun went down, and she wanted the mouths to look hungry for the crowds below.

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Mr Coyle, who owned the booth and the tin tea urn beside it, wanted the lips to announce the prices, so Ivy worked on a rickety ladder through a wet August, the wind lifting her paper and the gulls pecking at the lower lip while the paint was still tacky. Each morning she mended the damage with a sable brush no thicker than a hair, and each evening the mouths looked back at her from the boards, a little more pleased with themselves than she had made them.

The night the storm took the far end of the pier, the booth went with it. In the morning Coyle found the boards scattered across the wet sand, the three red mouths still open toward the water as though they were arguing with the tide. He sold the timber for firewood to a man in a van who never asked what was painted on it.

Ivy kept one lip, cut clean from the rest. Some winters she sat by the kitchen window and held it up against the glass, the orange tongue catching whatever light the street lamp gave, and she found she did not mind that it had nothing left to say.