Fine black single-line tattoo of a stylised face with a cap-like top and closed eyes, placed on the inner forearm.

Single-line face tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A continuous single-line drawing of a stylised face, with a split cap-like shape across the top, one closed eye, a small mark on the cheek and a simplified nose and mouth. The ink is a uniform black line with no shading, and the piece sits in the middle of the forearm against a plain skin background. The image is a close, straight-on photograph in soft indoor light.

Fine line Forearm Face Portrait Line drawing Cap

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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

Dougal never lifted the pen. It was the one rule he had kept since his uncle taught him on the back of a coal invoice: one line, start to finish, no going back. He sat on the step of the Mary Ellen with the tin of Indian ink wedged between his boots, the lock keeper's dog asleep on the towpath, and watched Ronnie Pask tie off his mooring lines on the far side of the cut.

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Ronnie came over with his cap pushed back and asked for his face the way a man asks for a cup of tea. He wanted the seam down the middle of the cap, the one he had stitched himself after his wife threw the first one in the cut. He wanted one eye shut, because he had winked at Maureen across the lock gates that morning and she had not winked back. Dougal drew it slowly. The nib hissed on the cartridge paper, and the river slid past, brown and patient.

He came to the cheek and stopped, though the pen did not. There was a mole there, small as a pinhead, and his uncle had said you never draw the marks a man carries about with him unless he asks you to. Ronnie had not asked. Dougal finished the line round the jaw and let the mole fall outside it, a dot on the paper where the nib had skipped.

Ronnie studied it a long time, then folded it twice and tucked it into the band of his cap. "You missed one," he said. Dougal nodded at the water. Somewhere behind them the lock began to fill, and the Mary Ellen rocked gently against her ropes.