Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a face with tousled hair and clasped hands on the forearm.

Sketched portrait and hands on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sketch-style portrait of a face in profile, with loose, tousled hair drawn in flowing lines and clasped hands below the chin. The work uses fine black linework with cross-hatched shading on the face and a dark, splattered wash behind the head. The image is tightly framed on the forearm, with the design running from the wrist to just below the elbow on a plain background.

Forearm Portrait Face Hand Hair Figure Sketch Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

He came back on the third wet Tuesday of the month, same as before, and sat on the stool with his hands knotted together as if he were holding something in that might get away. I had the sketchbook open before he'd settled. Mrs Okafor from downstairs claimed the studio smelt of linseed and cold tea, which it did, but she had never watched a face come out of nothing the way I could. My pen wanted the hair most. It lifted off his head in loose lines, stray and restless, like smoke that had forgotten where the chimney was.

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The black wash came from the ink pot. A lorry shook the window frame, the bottle rolled off the sill and burst across the page, and I nearly swore until I saw how the blot sat behind his skull, dark and ragged, as though someone had walked out of the room and left their shadow leaning on the wall. He didn't flinch. "Leave that," he said. "Draw it as it fell." So I did, hatching his cheek where the lamp caught it, working the mouth until it looked like it was about to ask a question it already knew the answer to.

He paid in coins, left a train ticket to Penzance on the stool, and did not come back. The next morning the sketch was dry. The face was the same, but someone had been at the hands. They were no longer clasped. They were open, palms up, fingers spread the way you hold them out for rain, and in the splatter behind the head a single clean line ran down toward the bottom of the page, like a road drawn by someone who meant to follow it.