Abstract black linework with a blue circle and soft pink and teal washes across a shoulder and upper arm.

Abstract linework and colour wash on shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with thin black lines that curve, branch and cross each other, with no clear figurative subject. A solid blue circle sits near the front of the shoulder, and soft pink and teal wash shapes sit beneath the lines, with a small dark blue dot over the teal area. The composition wraps from the shoulder top down the outer arm, and the photo is sharp with even daylight.

Shoulder Upper arm Circle Wash Abstract shape

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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

Put the kettle on and stop squinting at that map, love, because the map was drawn by a man who never once drove the Saltpan Run in August. Roads out here don't stay where they're told. They split at the dry well, pick up again behind the water tower, and cross themselves like a bad stitch. Everyone who has tried to follow the lines straight has ended up sat in the wrong town with the radiator smoking.

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My uncle Tobiah knew the trick. He'd rest his elbow on the wheel, watch the blue sun sit low over the ridge, and drive towards it until the teal haze came up off the tarmac like a river that wasn't there. He said the pink wash was where the heat lied to you, and the thin black lines were the roads that had decided to be roads anyway, whether the council liked it or not.

One evening in the year the bridge washed out, a lorry driver called Ferrin came off the highway with a load of cement and no sense of direction. Tobiah flagged him down at the fork by the chapel gate. Ferrin asked which way was the right one. Tobiah pointed at the spot where three lines crossed and said every road out here is right, you just have to decide which one is going to take you home.

Ferrin took the branch with the dark dot on it, got home by dawn, and never once in forty years of hauling asked a map for directions again.