Mixed colour tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded woman's face with lips, overlapping teal and red triangles, watercolour splashes and a beaded necklace.

Woman's face with geometric triangles on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A shaded female face with closed lips and a hairline blending into black ink sits at the centre of the design, partly crossed by large overlapping triangles in teal and dark grey. Soft red and maroon watercolour-style splashes, a strand of beaded necklace, vertical black lines and faint printed text fragments surround the face. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth on the portrait, while the colour washes and triangles are loose and layered across the forearm.

Realism Geometric Forearm Woman Face Lip Triangle Necklace Bead Watercolour Splash Text Line

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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

The proof sheets came up from the basement press still tacky, and Ada Marr was the only compositor at Hallam Street who read them twice. Tucked between an advert for mangles and a notice about the Whit bazaar was a pen-and-wash drawing she had never seen in copy: a woman's face tipped toward the lamp, mouth closed on whatever she had decided not to say, three sharp triangles of teal and slate slicing across her brow like pennants torn in a gale. Red washes bled out behind her like spilt wine. Beneath the chin ran a fragment of print in an old serif. If you could keep what you ask for, it began, and then the line broke off where the plate had been cut short.

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Nobody on the floor claimed it. Harold Quill, the editor, said it had come in with the Thursday carrier from Settle, wrapped in brown paper, with a string of jet beads knotted round the corner like a payment. Ada asked who had drawn it. He shrugged and said it was the only honest thing to cross his desk all year, which was not quite praise. She asked to keep the beads, and he let her, so long as the drawing ran.

She set the rest of the line herself that night, letter by letter from the case, and hand-rolled the red wash onto the block with a stiff brush while the others went home. The beads she pressed into the margin of the first sheet before it dried, so each copy would carry a small dark ring where they had sat. By morning the presses had thrown off four hundred impressions, and on every one the teal triangles had come out a shade greyer than she remembered, as if the ink had already started to forget.