Black and grey realism tattoo of a sleeping baby cradled by hands, across the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping baby in realism on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic tattoo shows a sleeping baby curled on its side, with its eyes closed and a hand or fingers cradling its body beneath. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft greys on the skin tones and deep black areas around the edges that fade into the background. The design fills the length of the forearm, and the blurred background is pale with dark shapes.

Realism Forearm Hand Portrait

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

In the kingdom of Varrowmere, where the river ran backwards on feast days and nobody thought this odd, the miller's youngest daughter Ysolde was the only person who could get the new prince to sleep. The palace had tried wet nurses, church bells and a choir of monks from the hill. Nothing worked until she sat on the cold step of the nursery with the child tucked on his side against her knees, one hand cupped beneath him like a bowl holding water.

Keep reading

The queen asked her how it was done. Ysolde said she did not know. She had only ever carried things that needed carrying: sacks of flour up the mill stairs, her brothers home from the ditches, a goose with a broken wing. The prince, she said, was lighter than all of them and heavier in a different way.

Winter came hard. The river froze to the bottom and the bells in the east tower cracked from the cold. One night the prince woke screaming and would not be lulled, and the court sent for the bishop, the herbwoman and the astronomer, who stood in the corridor arguing about the moon. Ysolde went in alone. She lay down on the rug, curled herself around nothing, and waited with her palm open until the crying ran out of him like water from a split jug.

When the thaw came, the queen had the nursery walls painted with what the miller's girl had shown her: a hand, open and patient, and the small curled shape resting in it, eyes shut. Ysolde never went back to the mill. Nobody in Varrowmere asked her to, because the palace had learned how a cradle was really made.