Two stylised face tattoos on a person's forearms: a colourful painted-style face with red shading on the left arm and a simple black line face on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two stylised face tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A torso-to-thigh view of a person in a white t-shirt with a dog print and denim shorts, arms held out to show two tattoos on the forearms. The left forearm carries a painterly portrait face in dark outline with red and pink shading behind it, while the right forearm has a minimal black line drawing of a face inside an oval. The composition is a straightforward outdoor street photo with the tattoos as the clear focus.

Forearm Face Portrait Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate of canvases had been lashed to the rail since Lisbon, and by the third week of the Atlantic the salt had got into every stretcher bar. Marit Ebbs sat on an upturned bucket in the cargo hold and scraped at a face she had painted four times already. The woman in it had a crooked nose and one eye pulled sideways, the way Marit remembered her mother looking over a pan of burnt porridge. Red ochre bled into the cheek where the damp air had softened the paint.

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Above her, through the hatch, the bosun's boy was singing something about a drowned miller. He came down the ladder with a bread roll in each fist and asked what she was making. She told him it was a portrait of nobody. He studied it for a long time and said nobody had a nicer face than that. Then he took a stub of charcoal from his pocket and drew an oval on the bulkhead beside her, filled it with two curved brows and a mouth like a shut purse. "That's the captain," he said. "He never smiles either."

They worked through the swell together, him drawing faces on every scrap of wood he could find, her painting over the tide-stained canvases until the hold smelled of linseed. When the ship made Recife the harbourmaster would not release the crates without a manifest, so Marit wrapped the portrait in oilcloth and tucked it under her arm. The boy stayed aboard with his charcoal and his captain's oval.

Years later, in a rented room in Bristol, she unwrapped the canvas and found the ochre had cracked along the same line as the captain's brow. She took a pencil and copied that small plain oval onto the back of the board, the way a sailor copies a name onto a tin. It was the only thing from the voyage she had kept without being asked.