Black and grey portrait tattoo of a woman with a voluminous updo and bare shoulder on the upper arm.

Woman portrait with updo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of a woman's head and shoulders in profile-to-three-quarter view, with her hair swept up into a high bun and long strands falling down the back. The linework is bold and sketch-like, with soft grey shading on the hair, face and shoulder. The design is entirely black and grey and fills most of the upper arm.

Upper arm Shoulder Woman Portrait Updo Hair Eye Shoulder

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marion,

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I nearly didn't come to the reunion, and I'm writing this on the train home because I want to tell you something before the bunting comes down. You'll remember Lorraine Pike, who sat behind us in Mr Haddow's art room and drew every teacher as a bird. She wore her hair up in that enormous black beehive every single day, with wisps pulled loose at the nape as if she'd just walked in from a gale. Nobody else could make it look careless. She said it took forty minutes and a can of lacquer.

Nobody mentioned her in the hall on Saturday. The DJ played something from 1997, the caterers ran out of sausage rolls, and I stood by the cloakroom feeling twelve again. Then Dennis from the year below came over with a folded paper napkin in his hand. On it was a pencil sketch of a woman looking over her shoulder, all sharp lines and smudged grey along the jaw, hair piled high and falling in long strands down her back. He said Lorraine had drawn it for him the week before we left, in exchange for his maths homework, and he'd kept it in his wallet ever since.

I asked whether she'd sent him anything else. He shook his head and said she'd drawn that same face on the back of every exercise book in the school, and he'd never once seen her finish a drawing of herself. Then he tapped the napkin and said, "She was looking back at us, though, wasn't she?" I didn't know what to say, so I bought him a pint, and we sat with her between us until they started stacking the chairs.