Two black and grey tattoos on a person's inner forearms, one showing a female profile with anatomical lines and the other a crowned Egyptian-style bust profile.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two profile tattoos on the forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two black and grey tattoos sit on the inner forearms of a person whose palms are turned upwards. The left design shows a female profile with fine anatomical linework and shading suggesting veins or muscle, while the right shows a crowned bust in profile with bold solid black areas. The photo is taken against a balcony with cacti and a city view behind, and the sleeves of a grey hoodie frame the arms.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wax lady had come up from the port in a crate marked fragile, and by the time the carter unloaded her in Mistle Cross, the chemist's apprentice, Ida Penrose, had already decided she would not sleep until the lid came off. Nobody in the town had seen the inside of a person before, not properly, only the pale hens and the pig carcasses hung up at Hobb's.

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Ida's uncle kept the surgery above the bakery, and he had a drawer of drawings: a woman with her skin peeled back in ink lines, every vein drawn like a river on a map. He said the drawings were for learning. Ida thought they were for lying, because nothing in them moved, and nothing in the town she loved stayed still.

On the night of the spring fair the wax figure was carried into the square and set beside a painted queen from the travelling show, a bust with a tall crown and a face cut hard and clean as a coin. Children dared each other to touch the glass. Ida lifted the lid of the crate herself and found, folded in the straw, a second picture she had never seen: the queen's profile traced on card, with a line of ink running down from her temple to the crown.

She carried it to the baker's wife, who had lived in the town longest and remembered everything. "Oh, that's the pair," the woman said, wiping flour on her apron. "Same hand. They were sisters of a sort, and they never agreed on anything except that a face is only ever the outside of a body." She handed back the card. "Put them side by side, love, and see which one blinks first."

Ida did. Neither of them did. She went home with the card up her sleeve and kept it there until the fair was over.

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