Black and grey tattoo on a forearm showing two overlapping female faces, one with a third eye, with arrows and flowing hair in a realistic shaded style.

Two faces and arrows on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two female faces overlap in a split composition, one in profile with a third eye on the forehead and the other with flowing, wavy hair. Three feathered arrows rise from the top left, and fine outline linework combines with soft grey shading to model the faces and hair. The design is in black and grey ink and wraps across the inner forearm, filling most of the frame against a plain background.

Realism Forearm Face Woman Arrow Feather Eye Hair Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamps along the quay are lying about the hour, and the bells across the river stopped counting an age ago. There were two sisters in the lower town of Vellmoor who shared a single face, which is how all the trouble started. The elder kept the proud brow and the heavy mouth. The younger kept the eyes, and the eyes were the problem, because they never stopped looking up at the rooftops where the nightwatch went about with their lanterns.

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Between them, in the middle of the forehead, sat a third eye that belonged to neither. It was the old harbour-keeper's eye, the story goes, put there to watch the sea. The younger sister took three feathered arrows from a fletcher on Tallow Street, who would not take coin for them and asked only that she never draw one at a man's back. She tucked them into her hair, which she wore loose and wavy like weed on the tide, and the elder sister grumbled about it every morning.

One night the elder stopped grumbling. She lifted the lamp from its nail and said, if we must share a face, we shall share the night too. The younger laughed and agreed. So they split the face down the nose, one walking the wet slates with the arrows while the other lay in the cellar and dreamed of boats. Neither ever quite believed the other was coming back.

When the bells finally began again, the two faces met above the harbour wall, pressed together like the halves of a broken coin. The third eye closed. In the morning the gulls found three feathered arrows floating in the shallows, their fletching still dry, and nobody in Vellmoor could say which sister had gone down to the sea.