The heads side of the penny has been wiped clean by white and green patterns of oxidation. “Liberty”, Lincoln, and the year are completely obscured. Actually, if it’s held up to the light, you can barely make out a few shapes – Lincoln’s collar and the shape of his forehead and nose. The the outer edge of the tails side is even more heavily corroded, you can still clearly read the larger words off the tails side. (“United States of America”, “One Cent”.) There’s an area in the middle that’s clean and shiny – the pillars and steps of the Lincoln Memorial emerging from a green and brown fog.
Supposedly the Federal Reserve will take any currency in any condition and exchange it for a shiny new one. I saw on a PBS or Discovery or History Channel program footage of a person give a dollar that was basically pressed against a brick for years on end, cut in half width-wise somehow, and tattered but spliced together. Would be a minutiae-filled experiment, I guess, to see if you can get a new penny for that.