Two ear tattoos on a pair of forearms, one filled with red ink and one with black, each with a shaded brown outline and a realistic ear shape.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two ear tattoos on forearms, red and black

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two tattoos of ears sit one above the other on the inner forearms of two arms, with the ear shapes drawn in skin-toned ink. The upper tattoo has a bright red fuzzy fill around the ear and the lower one has a black fill, both surrounded by soft reddish-brown shading. The photograph is taken straight on with a plain background, showing the full outline of both tattoos clearly.

Forearm Ear Outline

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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

The fair pitched on Thornly Green the week the river froze, and Abel Sallow set his trestle beside the coconut shy with a leather case open on his knee. Inside lay two wooden ears, one lacquered red and bristling with dyed wool, the other black as a rook's wing. A farthing bought a listen, he told the crowd, and a listen cost nothing more than the truth about what you had lost. Most laughed and walked on. Hester Dunn did not laugh.

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She came up the frosted lane with her shawl over her head and her hands tucked into her sleeves, and she asked for the red one. Abel fitted it to a loop of cord and held it against her cheek. For a long moment she heard only the carousel wheezing and the barker calling out the odds. Then, faint as a pin dropped down a well, came her boy's voice from the hayloft where he had gone to hide the night before he left for the mill towns, calling her to come up the ladder and see him. She had never climbed it. She had told the parish he went willingly.

Abel said nothing about that. He took back the ear, wiped the wool with his thumb, and fitted the black one to his own good ear, the one that had gone deaf the winter his father shut him in the barn. The fairground noise drained out of the world. He heard only the river under the ice and a small dog barking two fields away, and he sat very still until it stopped.

When the fair packed up at dusk, Abel left the red ear on the bench with a note tucked behind it: hold this to the wind and you will hear what is coming up the road. Hester Dunn found it at first light. She did not climb the ladder that morning. She walked down to the river instead, and she listened.