Realistic colour tattoo on a calf showing a man's face on a small infant body in a red tie, beside a green dollar sign on a blue background.

Realistic portrait of a man on a baby body

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a smooth, realistic portrait of a man with blond hair, set on a small infant body wearing a red necktie. A large white dollar sign sits on a green panel to the right, with a blue background behind the figure. Blended shading gives the skin and hair soft transitions, and the rich mix of blue, green and red makes the composition bold.

Realism Calf Portrait Man Face Dollar sign

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the one about the bairn who came up out of the Ferndale drift wearing a red tie and nothing else worth mentioning. He was no bigger than a loaf, and he had a grown man's face sat on top of him, the way a lid sits on a pan that is too big for it.

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The colliery was shut by then, and the men had nothing but coupons and the tallow of their own ideas. Young Dai Pritchard found the bairn in the lamp room, perched on the counter counting brass checks with his little fists. Dai asked him his business. The bairn said he was in the business of buying, and held up a green note with a white sign on it, crisp as a Sunday shirt, and said it would buy the whole valley if the valley was daft enough to sell.

Dai was not daft, but he was hungry, and hunger is a clever tutor. He sold the bairn the pit wheel, the chapel roof and his mother's clock, and the bairn paid him in paper folded small and tucked in his pocket. Each night the paper grew heavier and the valley lighter, until the rain came through the chapel and nobody could say which of them had been robbed.

Dai went up the tip at last to ask for his clock back. The bairn was sat on the slag, tugging the red tie loose, and he looked at Dai with a face far too old for the rest of him. 'You never read the small print, Dai,' he said. 'Nobody in this valley ever does. That is why I keep coming back.'

Dai looked down. The green note in his hand had turned to slate, and the sign on it was only the shape a seam makes in the dark.