Black stencil-style portrait of a woman with curled hair and closed eyes, tattooed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette-style portrait of a woman's face with closed eyes, full lips and voluminous curled hair, set against pale skin. The image uses flat black fill with no visible shading or grey tones, giving a bold stencil-like finish. The tattoo sits centrally on the forearm against a checkered floor background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Lowe had cut stencils for the fair at Kirkby Fold for thirty-one years, and she knew a face was easiest to cut when the eyes were shut. Open eyes asked for a hand that could manage fine lines around the iris. Shut eyes needed only a clean curve along the lids. So when the carter's daughter came up the pass in March asking for her mother's face on the cart's tailboard, Hester told her to close her own eyes and sit still in the lamplight while she worked.

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She cut the design from oiled card with a stub knife, leaving the hair as a tangle of black with small islands of white showing through. The mother had died in the snow that winter, and the girl wanted the lips full and the curls wide, because the wind on the pass took the thin things first. Hester did as she was asked. When the stencil was finished the girl held it up to the window and said nothing for a long while.

In June the girl came back. The card had gone soft and furred at the edges from the rain, and she had painted over the cut-out so many times that the face had spread into the wood like a shadow. Hester had no more oiled card, so she took the lid off an old tin and cut it again by candlelight, slower this time, and gave it back without a word about the price.

Every market day after that, Hester watched the cart come down the pass with its tailboard turned to the road, and the face on it kept its eyes shut all the way to the bottom.

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