Black and grey realism tattoo of a surreal face with flowing, organic forms covering a person's back.

Surreal face and flowing forms across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of a person's back, showing a face with a prominent nose, closed eye and parted lips, merged with swirling, sculpted forms that resemble skin peeling or stretching. The shading is smooth and highly detailed, with deep blacks, soft greys and bright highlights that give the forms a three-dimensional look. The camera views the back from behind, so no facial features of the wearer are visible.

Realism Back Face Nose Lip Eye Swirl Skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The varnish came away in strips the colour of weak tea, and by the third afternoon Dorothy had stopped pretending the mask was only plaster. She had started with the nose, a long bridge that threw a shadow across the bench even under the lamp, and the closed eye beside it looked less closed each morning she came in.

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The ledger said Josiah Crane, bell founder, died 1871, cast taken by his widow the morning after. Dorothy had catalogued a hundred such faces at the Holbeck museum and none of them had lips. This one had lips, parted a fraction, and when she lifted a crust of grey shellac from the mouth, a thin film of something like breath misted the inside of the case above it.

She wrote it up as a humidity fault. She told Eamon, the night porter, that the building was settling. He never asked her to look at the back of the mask, which she had not wanted to see, where the plaster had been scored with swirling channels, like skin being drawn over something turning slowly beneath it. On Friday the channels were deeper. On Saturday the case was empty and the mask lay face down on her bench, its back smoothed to a clean white curve that had not been there before.

She turned it over. The mouth had settled into the faintest curve, the kind a man wears when a long argument has finally been won. Beside it, on the glass of the bench lamp, was a single damp thumbprint, far too small for a bell founder's hand.