Black outlined smiley face with X eyes and lettering above and beside it, with blue and red watercolour-style splashes, on a forearm.

Smiley face with lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold black smiley face with X-shaped eyes sits at the centre of the design, with lettering set above it and down its right side. Soft blue and red splashes of ink sit behind and around the face, with bolder black strokes overlapping the outline. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a blue fabric background.

Lettering Forearm Smiley face Lettering Text Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewes had come down off the top field before the first snow, and by the second week of January the yard had frozen into one grey sheet that Ruth broke with a crowbar every morning before the feed. Her brother had always said the yard was the honest part of the farm, because it showed you exactly what the weather had done.

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On the side of the feed store, under a skin of frost, was the smiley face Owen had painted the summer the hay failed. He had used a tin of blue and a tin of red left over from the gate, and when the rain came he had painted two crosses for eyes, saying the thing had been meant to look like a man who had been paid in full and wasn't bothered by it. Under it he had written a line about fate, and under that, lower, a line about the smile fading when the heat went out of the year. The lettering had run in the wet, so the words looked like they were sliding off the paint.

Ruth took a wire brush to the door that afternoon, meaning to strip the flaking off before she primed it. The frost came away in flakes, then the old blue came with it, and beneath the blue she found Owen's pencil marks, a rough circle where he had sketched the face first, the way he always drew before he committed. She stood there with the brush in her hand while the light went flat over the fields. Then she left the crosses alone, because they were the only part of him still doing what he had meant them to do, and she went in to put the kettle on.