Colour tattoo of a outlined alien head surrounded by watercolour-style splashes in purple, teal, orange, green and yellow, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alien head with watercolour splashes

Other · Colour · Photo

A black-outlined alien head with almond-shaped eyes sits unfilled at the centre of the design. Loose, bleeding splashes of purple, blue, teal, orange, green and yellow surround it, with the colour fading softly into the skin at the edges. The photo is taken straight on, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a pale background.

Other Alien Splash

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

Mind the kettle, it spits when the wind's from the east, and sit where you can see the platform clock, because I've got to ring the bell for the 9.15 before I finish. Right. The night the paint man came off the Leeds train, it was raining sideways, and he had a canvas tube under one arm and a face on him like a boiled egg with a secret. Nobody in Carrow Bridge had a face like that, not then and not since.

Keep reading

He asked me for a ticket to the coast and I told him the coast was a long way off and the last boat had gone. He said he'd wait. He sat on the bench under the clock and unrolled the canvas, and it was nothing but splashes, purple and teal and orange, flung across the paper as if someone had thrown a jar of sunset at a wall. In the middle he'd sketched a little oval head with two slanted eyes, black lines, nothing filled in. I asked him what it was meant to be. He said it was a visitor waiting for someone to notice it wasn't from round here.

I didn't notice, not that night. I noticed the next morning, when the bench was wet with colour and the stationmaster's cat had walked the length of the platform with green paws.

Forty years on, I still keep a scrap of that paper in my tin of matches, the blue bleeding out to nothing at the edges. Some visitors never leave. They just fade into the parts of the town that were pale before.