Full-colour realism tattoo of an older man in a red and beaded feathered headdress, with a braid and layered beaded necklaces, on an upper arm and shoulder.

Realistic portrait with feather headdress on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A detailed portrait of an older man wearing a red and beaded feathered headdress, a long braid over one shoulder and layered beaded necklaces. The skin texture, wrinkles and shading are rendered with smooth tonal gradations. Strong reds, browns and greens dominate the colour palette against the wearer's white vest, and the design fills the upper arm and shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Portrait Man Headdress Feather Bead Necklace Braid

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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

Pull your chairs in closer, the band's on its break and the floor's still warm, so you'll hear me properly. Sixty years back this hall had a sign-painter called Ivor Pask who could make a bloater look like it had feelings. Nobody thought much of him until a retired railwayman, Albert Tandy, came in off the Sunday train with a battered trunk and a request. He wanted his portrait done, not a photograph, because a photograph only knows where the light happened to fall.

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Ivor set up in the back room behind the cloakroom for three weeks. Albert sat every afternoon in a chair with a headdress across his knees, red feathers and beaded bands that had belonged to a mate he'd worked the lines with out west, a man long dead. Ivor tried to flatter him with soft shadows. Albert shook his head. Paint the lines, he said, not the feeling. Every bead on that necklace was a day he'd remembered something he didn't want to. Count them properly.

When it was finished Albert studied it for a long minute and said, There's my face, and you've kept the frown. Then he asked Ivor to hang it not in the parlour where the gentry drank tea, but out here on the dance hall wall, where the young ones never sat still long enough to be looked at by anybody.

So that's where it's hung ever since. Tonight, when the couples spin past the cloakroom door, the red feathers catch the lamplight and the braid swings like a bell rope. If you're going out for a smoke, look up as you pass. He's still counting the beads.