Colour tattoo of a pint of stout with a face in the foam and a beer tap dripping at the top, placed on the calf in a neo-traditional style.

Stout pint with a foam face on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A pint glass filled with dark stout has a tan foam head with a cartoonish face, including a pair of eyes and a small tear. A beer tap with a red and black handle sits at the top right, with a single drip falling from its spout onto the foam. Bold black outlines, soft shading on the foam and a clean white highlight on the glass define the image, which is centred on a close-up of the calf against a blurred background.

Neo-trad Calf Face Drip Glass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Feathers had ever seen Walter Dunstan cry, so when his stout came up from the cellar line that Saturday with a face on the head, we all assumed the pump was playing up. Denise pulled it fresh and tried again, and the foam still had two sad eyes and a mouth pulled sideways, as if the cellar cat had brought him bad news. I set the pint on his beer mat and he didn't look up.

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"It's the Brenda business," Denise said, wiping the bar with a cloth that had seen better decades. "Forty-one years, and she took the good tablecloths and the budgie." Walter had sat by the radiator every Saturday since, nursing one half for three hours and saying nothing to anyone. Some of the regulars leant over to look at the foam, then looked away quick, the way you do at a stranger's trouble on a bus.

Around nine, a single drip ran from the spout of the tap, slid down the side of the glass and landed on the forehead of the face. Walter lifted the pint, sniffed it, and said the foam was the only honest part of any pint, because it never pretended to be anything else. Then he laughed, a wet bark that startled the darts team, and the face lost one eye to a rivulet on his lip.

He left a five-pound note under the glass with a beer mat tucked over it. On the back, in capitals: TELL THE FACE TO CHEER UP. IT'S BAD FOR TRADE. Denise pinned it above the tap. The next Saturday the foam came up smiling, and she swore on her mother's life that she hadn't touched a thing.