Two photographs show an abstract splatter tattoo with black lines, grey wash and teal and red dots, one across a woman's upper back and neck and one on an inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract splatter tattoos on neck, back and forearm

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A diptych shows a woman seen from behind with a loose, abstract tattoo across her upper back and the side of her neck, and a close view of a forearm carrying a similar design. The design uses thin black drips and lines, soft grey wash, and scattered teal, grey and red dots. The composition is unposed and placed against plain light backgrounds, with a blue floral fabric visible beside the forearm.

Back Neck Forearm Splatter Abstract Brushstroke Dot Ink drip Wash

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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 paint went over the side with the galley slops that first week out of Falmouth, and I have never been able to explain to anyone why I kept the tins. Ochre, a grey like wet slate, a teal Mr Okafor said was meant for the bulkheads and not for anybody's skin. We were nineteen days from the Azores when the swell got up and the paint got loose in the hold, and Ruth, who ran the sail store and did not suffer fools, came up the companion ladder with a rag wrapped round her hand and said the whole lot had burst.

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I spent the next two watches with a mop and a bucket of sea water, scrubbing black drips off the galley lino, and every drip I lifted seemed to fling itself back down in a new shape. By the third night the cook's table looked like the morning sky over Dundee, all smeared grey and flicked with spots. Ruth laughed at me for trying to save it. Then she took the tin of red from the rope locker and dabbed three marks on my wrist with her thumb, quick and careless, the way you'd mark a sack.

The marks stayed for the whole crossing, even through the scrubbing. When we docked in Lisbon I went to a parlour by the harbour and asked the man there to copy the lino exactly, every streak and speck, and he looked at me as if I had asked him to draw the weather. He did it anyway. Years later, when Ruth's letters stopped, I still took the sleeve off at the wrist to check the red was there, and it always was, a little fainter, like something left out in the rain.