Solid black blackwork tattoo of a stylised mask with closed eyes, a thin moustache and a pointed chin on the forearm.

Stylised mask tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised mask with narrowed, closed eyes, a curved moustache and a pointed chin, with a long curved line down each side. It is rendered in bold, solid black ink with clean edges and no shading or grey tones, and the skin around it is pale. The design fills the centre of the frame against a plain background.

Blackwork Forearm Mask Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the lane to Hollin Farm by the feast of Saint Lucy, and still Ada Peverell kept the lantern lit in the barn after dark, because the grain sacks were thinning and somebody was taking from them.

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Her grandfather had left a mask on the nail by the barn door. It was cut from black ash board and sealed with pitch, with its eyes shut to thin slits, a moustache that curled up at the ends like a cat's tail, and a point of beard hanging straight as a plumb line. The old men said a mask with its eyes closed cannot be fooled, because it sees nothing and so cannot be looked at either.

On the fourth night Ada took it down and tied it on, then sat in the dark among the sacks. Near midnight the bolt slid. Tom Rudd, the carter's boy who had been paid in flour since Michaelmas, came in with a sack on his shoulder and his breath smoking. He set it down, struck a match, and began talking to the sacks, because a lad alone in a barn talks to something. He told them about his mother's cough, and the debts, and how the squire never counted what he owed. Ada kept still and let him fill the silence.

When he had finished, the mask spoke in her own voice, low and flat. "Put it back, Tom, and tell me the rest in daylight." He ran so fast he left the match burning on the floor. In the morning the barn door stood open on a white field, the nail was bare, and a single line of boot prints ran towards Rudd's cottage, then turned back at the stile, as if the boy had thought better of it. Ada hung the mask up again and left the lantern on.