Sketch-style tattoo of a woman's head and shoulders with swept-up hair on the inner forearm, shaded in grey and black with touches of red.

Vintage woman portrait sketch on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's face, neck and upper shoulders with her hair pinned up in loose, wavy strands. The linework is loose and sketchy, with hatched and scribbled shading in the hair and along the neck, giving a hand-drawn, vintage illustration feel. Dark grey and black ink dominates, with small touches of red and brown near the neck and shoulder, set against a dark background.

Forearm Woman Portrait Face Hair Neck Shoulder Sketch

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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

Mrs Hale would not sit still for a second sitting, so I drew her from the hat stand instead, pinning her grey shawl over the rail until the shape looked right. The magazine wanted a face that could sell corsets and railway tonic in the same column, and I had spent three weeks producing faces that sold nothing. Hatching the hair was the only part I trusted. I cut my pencil to a blunt wedge, the way my father taught me, so each stroke went in quick and uneven and came out dark where I pressed.

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On Thursday Mr Pruett turned the sheet face down on his blotter and said it looked like a woman who had heard bad news and was too well brought up to show it. I told him that was the point. He said a drawing ought to look as if it were going somewhere. I took it home and found the red chalk I had been saving for a sunset, and under the lamp I drew one thin thread along the jaw, where a collar would have sat.

The next morning the sheet was gone from my drawing board. My landlady had scrubbed the wood and left a note on the sill: a girl from the post office had come asking for the lady who looked as though she was waiting for a letter. I walked there in the sleet. The girl was behind the counter with her hair pinned loosely up, and when she saw me she lifted the drawing from her basket, looked at the red line at her neck, and said nothing, which was the first thing I had ever drawn that did exactly what I wanted.