Colour tattoo on a forearm of a split design: one half shows a red-haired doll with stitched cheeks and one eye, the other a pale stitched skull-like face with black eye sockets and dark wisp-like

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Split stitched doll face on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two stitched, doll-like faces divided down the centre, one side with red hair and a single closed eye, the other pale with dark sockets and black spiky hair. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft black and grey shading on the dark hair and the clothing. Red ink dominates the left half and black and grey fill the right, set against the skin of a forearm.

Forearm Doll Skull Red hair Wing

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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

The thread ran out twice before Maud Harrow finished the face, and by then the stall in Saltcombe had already sold her three better dolls. She stitched the mouth in a wide, grinning line, row after row of black cotton, because the Cutler sisters had paid in advance and asked for something that would frighten their cousin from Penzance.

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Halfway through the second night she gave the doll two faces. The left half took red wool for its hair and one eye she closed with a neat dart of thread, as if it had grown tired of looking. The right half she left pale as a candle, with two dark buttons for sockets and black feathers fanned down the back, so the wings seemed to grow out of the cloth itself. She cut the doll down the middle with her sharp scissors and sewed the halves together again, neither forgiving the other.

The Cutler girls came back the next week wanting to swap it. The red side, Edie said, had sent her little brother into a fever; the black side had kept her awake until dawn. Maud took the doll from the counter and turned it in the lamplight, and saw that three stitches on the pale side had been picked out and sewn again in red. Edie swore she had not touched it. Her sister would not look at either of them.

Maud wrapped the doll in brown paper and kept it on her windowsill, where the sea could see it. Some things a maker cannot put right by unpicking them, and she had learned to leave the thread alone once it had decided for itself.