Black and grey realism tattoo on the outer thigh showing a row of bare trees above water, with a realistic face with closed lips in the reflection below.

Trees reflected in water with a face on the thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the outer thigh, with a dark silhouette of bare trees along a horizon at the top. Below, rippling water reflects the trees and a realistic face, showing the nose and lips, which is partly broken up by the ripples. The work uses fine greyscale shading and high contrast, and the composition is vertical, following the shape of the leg.

Realism Thigh Tree Water Reflection Face Forest Lip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyors had drowned the village in 1961 to make the reservoir, and by the time Nell Harrow came back to check the spillway, the birches on the old lane had grown up through the stone walls and into the sky. She rowed out from the boathouse at first light, because the water was still then, and a still reservoir keeps a better picture than any camera.

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On the third morning she saw the face. It rose from beneath the reflected trunks, eyes closed, the lips parted as if about to speak a name, and the ripples ran across it like hair blown back from a brow. Nell knew it. It was the face on the tin of cocoa in her grandmother's pantry, the woman who had kept the lamp lit at the crossroads before the water came. Nell had always been told she went to live in Liverpool.

She tried to row over it, and the oars broke the glass into a thousand small mirrors. Each one showed a different birch and a different sky, and none of them showed her. Her grandmother had warned her that the drowned keep their own weather. Nell waited, the boat turning slowly on the current, until the surface smoothed and the lips moved once, shaping a word she could not hear.

She wrote it in the survey book beneath the depth readings, the way she logged everything. Beside the figure for the spillway she made a small tick, and then, because the book was hers and nobody else would ever read it, she wrote the word she had read from the water: home. The next morning the reservoir was full of trees and nothing else.