Black and grey surreal face tattoo covering a man's full back, with shaded eyes, a prominent nose and lips among flowing organic forms.

Surreal face tattoo across a full back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man's back is covered by a large black and grey tattoo of a face with shadowed eyes, a prominent nose and parted lips. Flowing, organic shapes and smooth shading wrap around the face, giving it a sculpted, surreal look. The design fills the back from the shoulders down towards the waist.

Realism Back Face Eye Nose 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

Sit closer, the rain has got into the awnings again and the lamps only reach the first few stalls. You want the face? Everybody wants the face. Old Mirela made it the winter the river froze, out of plaster and a little lamp black, and she sold it to nobody for years, because nobody could bear to look at it for long. The eyes were shut the way a sleeper's are when the dream is worse than waking, and the mouth was parted as if it had just stopped mid-sentence.

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Tomas, who sold eels and onions two stalls down, bought it on a wet Thursday for three coins and carried it home under his coat, the plaster ribbons curling round its brow like smoke off a frying pan. He hung it over the bed. In the mornings the lips seemed a little further apart, and the flowing shapes around the cheeks had shifted, as if something behind the plaster had been turning over in its sleep.

He stopped sleeping after that. He began talking to the face, and it answered in the sound of rain on the tin roof, which is the only answer a face like that has ever had. His wife Ilse took the boy and went to her sister's in the hills. Tomas came back to the market one grey morning with the face in a sack, meaning to sell it on at a loss. Mirela took one look at it and laughed until she coughed. You did not buy a face, she said. You bought the thing the face was keeping in.

He left it on her stall that afternoon and walked home without it. When the market packed up, the stallholders found the eyes open and the rain running down the plaster in long grey streaks. A traveller bought it for a single coin and asked nothing. Rain does not wash off a thing like that, you understand. It only makes it shine.