Realism tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded nose and glossy red lips beside a red rose, with a cracked-skin effect and black linework below.

Realistic nose, red lips and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The design shows a close-up of a nose and parted lips, with a red rose and a leaf at the upper right. The face is rendered in fine black and grey shading with smooth gradients, while the lips and rose use bright, saturated red with strong highlights. Dark tendril-like linework sits at the bottom of the composition, and a cracked-skin effect runs down the left side.

Realism Forearm Nose Lip Rose Leaf Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie,

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You will not believe what the frost did to the old wall at Thornleigh. I went out at seven with the tea still warm in my hand and found the crack had opened clean through the face of the stone head Mr Abbott carved for his wife in 1911. It runs from the brow, down past the nose, and parts the lips as neatly as if someone had drawn a knife along them. The rose I planted against it last summer, that Albertine that never did anything but sulk, had shoved its way into the gap overnight. There is one bloom, red as a postbox, sitting over the left eye like a hat somebody forgot to take off.

Mrs Pryce from the cottage came up the lane with her secateurs to tell me it was a sign. I told her it was a crack, and that cracks are only signs when you want them to be. She laughed, then went quiet, the way she does, and said her mother used to paint those lips red every spring until the paint grew so thick you could no longer see the mouth beneath. Nobody at Thornleigh has had the heart to scrub them back to grey.

So I have decided to leave it. I have set a bamboo cane beside the stem to stop the wind taking it, and told Tom not to go near the wall with the pointing trowel until the weather turns. The bees found the rose before I did. They go in and out of the crack as if they are reading something.

Come up at the weekend if the trains behave. Bring the good scissors. I want to show you what the lips look like in the low sun, when the red goes almost black at the edges and the crack holds a shadow like a line of ink.

Love, Ruth