Small solid black silhouette tattoo of a figure with a hat-like shape on the upper arm, below a blue and white striped sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small black silhouette tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a solid black silhouette shows a figure with a hat-like shape above a rounded head and a simple profile. The shapes are filled in with no visible linework or shading, and the design is set against pale skin. The photograph is taken close up at an angle, with the striped sleeve and a dark sofa at the edges of the frame.

Upper arm Figure Hat Silhouette Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Sophie, the seamstress has pinned the lace three times and still says the hem is crooked, so I am writing this at the kitchen table where Dad's old cutting shears lie open like a heron's bill. You asked me to tell you about Uncle Tom before the ceremony, so here it is, though Mum will say I have it all wrong.

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He cut silhouettes for the harbour regulars for forty years, sitting on an upturned crate outside the Anchor with black card across his knee. He never drew first. He would snip a tricorn from the top edge, then a round head, then the bump of a pipe or a curl of hair, and hand it over before the sitter had finished blinking. Nobody who got one ever asked for it back.

Last Tuesday I found a folder in his coat with a dozen blank sheets and one cut figure, a man in a low hat with a rounded skull and a nose like a fishhook. Underneath, in pencil, he had written 'for the bride's father, when he stops being cross.' Your father, Sophie. I think Tom meant to give it to him at the wedding and lost his nerve. So I have brought it, folded in my purse, and I am going to hand it over at the breakfast, when the sherry is out and nobody can refuse it.

I'll write again to say whether he kept it in his waistcoat pocket, or whether he held it up to the window and laughed the way Tom always did when he had got the profile exactly right.