Single line profile face on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A continuous black line forms an abstract human profile, with overlapping shapes suggesting a face and a raised hand or hair above it, and the outline of a neck and shoulder below. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on pale skin. The tattoo fills the centre of the forearm against a soft, blurred grey background.

Fine line Forearm Face Profile Line art Neck Shoulder Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the Thursday market in Carrow the rain came sideways off the river and the stalls sagged under it. Mabel Orr sold pencils from a trestle beside the fish hall, and she never lifted her pen from the paper once it touched. Her father had taught her that, and his mother before him: a line that leaves the page has given up on the face it was meant to make.

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One morning a man came out of the rain with his collar turned up and asked her to draw him. He had no money, only a hand that kept rising to his head as if to hold a hat that was not there. Mabel said she would draw him once, from the throat to the crown, and he could pay her with the first true thing he remembered. He agreed. She started under his chin and let the pen run up the jaw, over the cheek, past the nose and the closed mouth, round the brow. At the top of his head the line rose again, over something she could not see, a raised hand or a fold of hair, and came back down to meet its own beginning.

When she lifted the pen, the rain had stopped and the man was gone. The page held a profile with one hand lifted above it, the eye a hollow almond, the mouth shut on a word. Beneath the drawing, in her own neat writing, was the thing he had owed her: a wedding in a village the market had forgotten, and a bell that rang for a girl who never came home.

She pinned the drawing under the awning where the rain could not reach it. Each Thursday the raised hand sat a little higher above the brow, as though the man were lifting his hat to someone passing in the wet, and nobody who bought a pencil from her ever asked whose face it was.