Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a woman's face with a tall beehive hairstyle and dark lips, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised woman portrait with beehive hair on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold solid-black silhouette of a woman's face and tall beehive hair, with the pale skin left open to form her face and neck. The linework is simple and graphic, with curling strands of hair ending in scroll-like shapes at the bottom edge of the design. The ink is entirely black on light skin, set against a dark background with a patterned fabric to the right.

Blackwork Forearm Woman Portrait Face Silhouette Lip

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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

Hush now, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the good oil. No, not that wick, the one Tamsin trimmed this morning. There. Now listen, because I'll tell this only once before the tide takes the lower steps.

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The painted woman on the harbour wall was made by hands nobody living remembers. She had a hive of hair piled higher than the gulls could reach, and her face was left out of the paint so the bare stone showed through. The old women said she was the Keeper's wife, who climbed the wall each dusk to count the boats home. Others said she was only a warning, a shadow cut against the sea so the drowned could find the edge of the land.

Eighty winters back, a boy named Oren Vell came down from the high farms with a tin of tar and a bad temper. He'd been sent to mend the wall. He scraped the moss from her hair and found that the curls at her hem were not curls at all but little scrolls, like the ends of unrolled charts. Under them, scratched faintly, were the names of forty-one boats. He read each one aloud until the wind dropped.

When the storm came that autumn, the lamp failed and the harbour went dark. Oren stood where the painted woman stood and held up his lantern so her outline, black on pale stone, was the only thing a fishing boat could find. They came in one by one, steering on her shape. Forty-one boats. Forty-one names.

So when you see her, child, don't trace her lips for luck. Count the scrolls. Then go home.