Realistic colour tattoo of a mask emerging through torn skin on the forearm, shown in shades of tan, red and black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Torn skin revealing a mask on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm carrying a realistic tattoo of a pale mask with narrowed eyes and a smiling mouth, appearing to tear through the skin. The shading is smooth and three-dimensional, with dark recesses around the eyes and nose and a warm blush on the cheek. Ragged red and brown strands surround the mask, and the torn edges are rendered in colour that fills most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Mask Torn skin Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Registry sent the ink for my forearm the week after my brother went under the Tallow Gate and did not come back up. It came in a grey sachet with a card that read COMPLIANT FACE, SEVENTH ISSUE, and a diagram of a pale mask I was meant to press into the skin like a seal. Mam had kept her own face under a sleeve for forty years, and I had always assumed she was hiding a bruise.

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The needle was warm from the charger. The woman who worked the stall in Cask Row did not look up while she packed the tear lines in, red and brown, ragged as cut rope. She said the trick was to let the skin lift before the face went in, so it looked like the face was climbing out rather than being pushed. I asked whether people ever wanted it back. She laughed and said the Registry had never once taken a face off anyone.

After the third night the mask began to show through. I would wake with the taste of tin and find the narrowed eyes in the washroom glass, the mouth bent upward as if someone had just told me something funny. Mam's sleeve lay folded on the chair. I cut the cloth away with the kitchen shears and held my arm under the bulb, and the pale face turned, slowly, the way a sleeper turns toward a voice.

I did not stop smiling when I set the shears down. That was the worst of it, and the best. Below, the drones were counting heads in the stairwell, reading foreheads for the approved face, and every one of them slid straight past me. I have started going up to the roof without a coat. The wind lifts the ragged strands and the mask stays put, grinning at the city, and I let it.