Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single-line face on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a face in profile, drawn with a single continuous black line, sits on the outer forearm. The linework is thin and even, with the eye, lips and hair suggested by a few simple strokes and no shading. The tattoo is the clear focus against soft, blurred dark and neutral tones in the background and a dark jumper sleeve at the top of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Face Profile Line drawing Hair

Find an artist for this

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

The rain has found the gap between the awnings again and runs in a thin bright line off the corner of your table onto the blank pad. You don't wipe it. A woman has stopped twice at the end of the row, and you can tell she is deciding whether to sit. Three pounds a portrait, says the card, in marker gone blue with damp. Nobody on Cutler's Yard pays for anything they can't carry home, but people still want to be looked at.

Keep reading

She sits. She asks you not to make her look sad, and you say you won't, and you don't lift the pen. You draw the way your mother taught you on the backs of bus timetables: one unbroken line that starts at the fold of an ear, runs down past the cheek, round the mouth, and up into a fall of hair you never close. Halfway round the chin you feel her go still. The tarpaulins drum. A dog barks at the fishmonger's radio. You keep going, because lifting the pen would mean admitting you don't know where the face ends.

When you turn the pad around she says nothing for a long while. Then she asks whether it's meant to be one line all the way round. You tell her yes, it's one journey, and it never comes back to where it started. She pays from a purse with a broken clasp, folds the page twice and walks towards the station with it held flat under her coat.

You pack up at four, when the light gives out and the gutters roar. The pad you leave behind has a smear of blue where the card slid off the table, a shape you didn't intend that could be a shoulder or a wing. Somebody will find it in the morning and wonder who drew it, and you will be somewhere dry, not knowing either.