Small black outline smiley face tattoo on the top of a toe, with a textured white fabric in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Smiley face tattoo on a toe

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A simple smiley face is tattooed on the top of a toe, shown in close up. The design is a black outlined circle with two dot eyes and a curved smile, drawn with even, medium-weight linework. The ink is black on tan skin, and the pale textured background fills the left side of the frame.

Other Smiley face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry from Oban is late again, and you are standing on the slipway with a biro, because the man in the harbour office said the new laminator would arrive by spring and that was four springs ago. Nobody on Carra minds the wait. The gulls mind it less than anyone. You have decided to be the sort of person who draws on things while she waits, so you draw a circle on the back of your hand, then two dots, then a curve that lifts at the ends like a boat's bow.

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Mrs Dunlop from the post office comes down with her umbrella furled under one arm. "That's cheerful," she says, which is what people on the island say when they mean it's odd. You tell her it's the only face you can draw without it looking like someone you know. She laughs, short and sharp, and says her husband drew the same one on every lobster crate he ever sent south, so the buyers in Glasgow would know the catch was his, and that when he drowned off the Skerry the crates kept going out with the face on them for a whole year because nobody had the heart to stop.

The next morning you go down to the slipway and find the bollards chalked with the same face, every one of them, and under each a small word in a hand you know from the parcel labels. The word is always the same. It is always "still". You stand there a long time, the biro cold in your fist, until the tide begins to come over the stones and the chalk runs into little grey tears.

The ferry's horn sounds beyond the point. You press the biro to your knuckle and draw one more face, slightly crooked, and you do not wash it off.