Black fine line tattoo of a face in profile on the inner wrist and forearm, with a gold digital watch worn beside it.

Single line face in profile on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A continuous black single line forms a stylised face in profile, with a simplified eye, nose, lips and chin, and a few angular strokes extending above the head. The ink is even and crisp against pale skin, with no shading or colour. The tattoo sits on the inner wrist and forearm, with a gold digital watch and a blue sleeve in the frame and pink tiles behind.

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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

Dear Nell, the clock above the tram depot says twenty past ten and I have not moved from this stool since the last bell. You will laugh, but I finally drew Mr Okonedo's face without lifting the pen. Eleven minutes, one unbroken line, and the rule I set myself at the start was that no mistake could be rubbed out. Every wobble in the brow stays there now as a small decision.

Keep reading

He came in off the night shift at the Corn Exchange, smelling of diesel and wet cardboard, and asked for his profile the way the streetlamps see it, flat and a little orange. The three sharp strokes above his head are the crane jibs on the Salford side, which he insisted on because he has watched them lift the same crates for thirty years and says they are the only things in the city that never look tired. I told him they looked like a crown that had been sat on. He said that was fair.

The line wanted to close at the chin, so I took it round the throat and back toward the jaw, and somewhere near the bottom it stopped meeting its own beginning. I expected him to mind. Instead he tapped the paper with one finger and said that was where he'd be leaving from, and that he'd like the gap left open so he could still get in.

Come and see it before the ink on the paper goes the colour of weak tea. Bring the good biscuits. Love, Ada.

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