Abstract watercolour-style tattoo on an arm, with black linework, red circles and green, yellow and blue washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract watercolour splash on an arm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

An abstract design of loose black linework, dotted marks and open circles sits over soft washes of red, orange, green, yellow and blue. The brushed colour blends into the skin, with the thick black lines giving structure across the forearm. Colour ink dominates the composition, which runs the full length of the visible limb.

Forearm Abstract Splatter Circle Brushstroke Watercolour Paint splash Dot

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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

Mrs Abernethy's bakery sign had been wrong for three weeks before Tomasz finally climbed the ladder with his tins. The paint was meant for lettering, for the gilt loops of BREAD and the green rule underneath, but the morning the tide came up Harbour Lane he had left the jars open on the step, and a gull had stood in the middle of them like a bishop at a font.

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He spent the afternoon scraping the wall with a palette knife, and by four o'clock the wet colour had dried into something he could not scrape off. Red bled into the brick in rings. Lemon ran down in a thin, nervous line. Somewhere a blue had gone skidding across the plaster like a boat pushed off from shore, and no amount of turpentine would make it go back.

So he left it. He drew over the stains with a fine brush and a pot of ink, black lines that ran through the colour without asking permission: a hook here, a dotted path there, a circle that swung around the others as if it had been thrown. Dora from the fish stall said it looked like a map of somewhere that had only just finished being born. The bakery sold out of loaves that week, though nobody could say whether it was the bread or the wall people came to see.

Mrs Abernethy never did get her lettering. Tomasz painted it on the shutters instead, in plain black, and the children, who could read, stopped at the wall every morning to look for the place where the ink had found its way home.