Colour realism tattoo of an older man with red face paint and a feathered headdress, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic portrait of a man in feathered headdress

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A realistic portrait of an older man with deep lines in his forehead and cheeks, wearing red face paint across the upper face and a headdress of feathers in red, orange and purple. The shading is smooth and detailed, with strong highlights on the nose and brow. Warm skin tones contrast with the bright red paint and the coloured feathers fading into the background at the edges of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Portrait Man Feather Headdress Face paint

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The widow sent the portrait back on the Tuesday, wrapped in her late husband's oilcloth, with a note pinned to the stretcher that said only: Not him. I stood in my top-floor studio in Leeds with the rain coming sideways off the chimney pots and turned the canvas to the window, and I could see what she meant, though I could not have said it then.

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Edwin Harcourt had sat for me three times in March, in the good chair by the stove, and I had worked from those sittings and a tintype his sister kept in her Bible. I gave him the red band across the brow and cheekbones because his old company had worn that colour, and a cream line beneath it like a bandage. Above his head I put a plume of feathers from a cheap box of pigments my father used to sell to the sign-painters on Briggate: orange, violet, a bruised green at the edges where the paint ran thin. I thought it looked like a man who had carried something a long way.

I took the train to Wakefield with the canvas across my knees. Mrs Harcourt made tea in a brown pot and watched me unwrap it on her kitchen table. She said he had never looked that tired, not even at the end, and that the lines in his cheeks were mine, not his. She was right. I had put in every crease I had been looking at in my own shaving mirror that winter.

I did not argue. I mixed a plain grey, took the brush to the lines and the shadow under the eyes, and by evening the face was smoothed back into something quiet. When I went to collect my things she had already hung it in the scullery, red band level with the copper, so that he could watch over the washing as he always had. She asked me to leave the feathers as they were.