Black and grey realism tattoo of a woman's face with a tear-streaked eye, with German lettering, on a man's upper arm and shoulder.

Realistic woman's face with tear on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey realistic portrait of a woman's face covers the upper arm, with one eye shown in detail and dark tears running down the cheek. German lettering runs across the shoulder and down the side of the arm, with shading and soft grey gradients across the skin. The composition fills the upper arm and shoulder, with a white vest and a chain visible at the edges of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Woman Face Eye Tear Portrait Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frieda had locked the heading upside down in the forme, and she only caught it because the proof came off the bed reversed, like a word read in a shop window. She swore under her breath, the way her father had taught her on the Altona docks, then pulled the sheet and laid it under the lamp.

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The copy came from a man in a grey overcoat who had waited in the front office without taking it off. Auflehnung, he said, and then the lines about the most powerful of all rights and the most necessary of all duties. He wanted them set above a photograph of a woman's face, the half-lit one the engraver had hammered into a plate: heavy lid, a dark line running from the lashes to the jaw. Emil at the next case said the tears alone would take a week to etch. Frieda said the tears were the only honest thing on the page.

They worked through that November with the wind pushing soot against the skylight. Each morning she checked her letters and each morning found a different fault: a missing umlaut, a line sitting too close to the margin, an n turned on its side. Emil stopped asking why she would not let the sheet go to press. She only knew that the sentence about duties had to be exact, or nothing else on the leaflet would be believed.

On the last night the man in the grey coat came back for the final proof. Frieda handed it over with the ink still tacky along the cheek. He held it to the window, pressed his thumb against the blur at the eye, and left a smear the shape of a single tear. "Good," he said, folded the sheet into his coat, and walked out without paying.