Four views of an abstract watercolour-style forearm tattoo with black ink splatters and red and teal washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract splatter forearm tattoo

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the same forearm from four angles, with an abstract design of loose black ink splatters, thin dark strokes and fading shapes. Red and teal washes run through the black marks, and the splatters are scattered across the whole forearm. The shading is soft and blended rather than hard-edged, and the composition wraps around the arm.

Forearm Abstract Splatter Ink splatter Brush stroke

Find an artist for this

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 paint had dried on the lid of the tin for a fortnight before Marguerite finally prised it open with a butter knife. Inside, the black had gone to a crust the colour of old tar, and she stirred it with the handle of a brush until it gave up a little of its shine. Her father had mixed his own ink, grinding soot from the chimney with gum arabic and whatever cheap wine was in the cellar, and he had never once let anyone else touch the jar. Now the jar sat on the windowsill of a flat above a bakery in Leeds, and the bakery's extractor fan rattled every time someone opened the back door.

Keep reading

She painted the way he had taught her, which was badly at first. You loaded the brush, held it high, and let the wrist fall. The ink did what it wanted. Where it struck the wet paper it bloomed into a star, and where it struck nothing it ran off the edge of the page into the cloth below. Her father had called those accidents the honest parts. He used to say a careful line was a lie told in pencil first, and the splatter was the only thing in the room that had never pretended to be anything else.

On the last Sunday of the month she taped twelve sheets to the wall and flung ink at them in a sweep from left to right until her shoulder ached. She stepped back. Among the black bursts, a thread of teal had crept in from the water pot, and a smear of rust-red from the cadmium had landed where her hand had slipped. Something was there, a shape half-remembered, a figure turning away from the window. She did not touch it. She went to the sink, washed the brush, and left the paper to dry in the light that came through the bakery's steam.