Realistic black and grey portrait of a man's face framed by tribal scrollwork on an upper arm.

Realistic portrait of a man framed by tribal scrollwork

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic portrait of a man's face fills the centre of the design, with shading on the cheeks, brow and nose and a few warm pink tones on the skin. Bold black outlined scrollwork in a tribal style surrounds the face and continues down the arm. The tattoo is shown up close on an upper arm against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, the lift in Ferris House has been dead since Tuesday, so I carried the drawing down four flights rolled inside a bin liner and it still came out creased at the corner where Mrs Okafor leaned on it to light her cigarette. I'm sorry about the crease. The face is all right. I had the photograph propped against the kettle for three nights and kept getting the cheekbones wrong until Dad's old rule came back to me: shade the side the light doesn't reach, not the side it does.

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The scrollwork is the part you'll tease me about. I copied it from the carved gateway at the community hall, the one with the rusted hinge nobody oils, and I thickened every line with the good marker you bought me at Christmas so it would survive a photocopier. Where the scrolls curl round his jaw I left the paper bare, which Mr Halloran at the printers said looked like a mistake. It isn't. It's where the frame gives up and lets him breathe.

Ruth from the fourth floor came up to see it and stood so long her tea went cold. She said he looked like someone waiting at a bus stop for a bus that wasn't coming, then apologised, because she didn't know him. Neither do I, not really. I only know he sat on the bench by the bins every evening last summer, looking over the car park at the cranes, and nodded at me once as if we'd agreed on something.

I've put the drawing on the table where the window light falls across it at six. It's the best thing I've made and I'm not going to say so again. Come and see it before the cranes come down. Love, Nell.

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