Abstract brush-stroke tattoo on a forearm in black, grey-green and red ink, with splatter dots and loose vertical strokes.

Abstract brush strokes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the outer forearm with loose, abstract brush strokes and splatter dots in black and dark grey-green. Small red strokes sit among the lines, adding the only warm colour. The linework is tapered and gestural, and the composition runs diagonally up the arm against a plain white background.

Forearm Brush stroke Splatter Dot Abstract 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

Ada Vosper had three days to letter the name on the Kittiwake's transom before the spring tide, and on the second afternoon the brush jumped out of her hand at the edge of the gantry. Black sign enamel ran down the hull in a long tapered thread, then spat into a spray of dots across the slipway planks. Old Tobias Lowe, who had painted the harbour's boats for forty years, watched from his stool and said nothing, which was how she knew he was enjoying it.

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"Leave it," he said at last. "Nobody buys a boat for her lettering." She scraped at the mess with a palette knife, but the splatter had soaked into the grain, and the scraping only smeared it into grey-green bruises. Hal from the net loft came down with a tin of red lead for the bilge and dragged a stroke of it along the rail, bright as a cut, and Ada laughed for the first time that week.

By evening the transom looked as though a squall had blown through an ink pot. The lettering was gone entirely, and she had to admit the thing on the hull was finer than anything she had planned: lines leaning into one another like reeds in a turning tide, dots scattered where the gulls might settle. Tobias came round with a paraffin lamp, looked for a long time, and asked what she meant to call it.

She told him the boat would be the Wake now. He grunted his approval, and in the morning the owner arrived, a retired pilot with a gruff manner, who stood before the stern in silence for a good minute before offering to pay double for a name he could not pronounce.