Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single-line face on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, continuous black line drawing of a stylised face in profile, with one closed eye, a simple nose and lips, sits on the inner upper arm. The linework is thin and even with no shading, and the ink is solid black on pale skin. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a soft grey fabric and a blue denim sleeve in the background.

Fine line Upper arm Face Profile Line drawing Eye Lip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came in sideways over the stalls at Cutler's Yard by half eleven, and the canvas on my pitch sagged like a wet sail. I had a folding table, three fineliners in a biscuit tin and a card that read Your Face, One Line, Five Pounds. Most people laughed at it. Most people kept walking, shoulders up, phones held over their heads.

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Then a woman in a borrowed coat stopped and asked whether I could do it without lifting the pen. I said I could try. She sat on the crate opposite and turned her head to the left, showing me one side only, and warned me not to stare at her eye, because it made my hand go soft. So I started at the brow and let the line run over the lid she allowed to close, down past the bridge of the nose, round the lips and back to the chin, never once lifting the nib while the rain ticked on the plastic sheeting above us.

When I finished she held the page up against the grey sky and said it looked like someone who had just decided not to say something. She paid with a crumpled ten and waved away my change. I folded the drawing into my apron pocket and walked the length of the market without a sale in my hand, which felt like a kind of rudeness to the rain.

That night I practised on the back of a receipt until the ink wore through the paper. The rain stopped around six. I still had the first line in my wrist, one unbroken stroke that had gone out into the city and not come back.