Woman seated with a realistic black and grey animal portrait on one leg and a colourful cat, ladybird and hummingbird sleeve on her arm.

Animal sleeves with cat, ladybird and bird

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A seated woman shows two large tattoo pieces, a black and grey realistic animal portrait covering the leg and a colour piece on the arm. The colour sleeve includes a cat's face at the top, a red ladybird in the middle and a hummingbird near the wrist, with soft watercolour-like blending. The black and grey portrait uses smooth shading and dark contrast, and the image is framed from the torso down with the subject's face out of shot.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Thigh Cat Animal portrait Wolf Dog Ladybird Hummingbird Bird

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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

Sit closer, the lamp will gutter before the wheel stops turning. You see that grey wolf painted on the poster by the dodgems? Old Jacob Quill kept a real one in a cage behind the waltzer, and every night at the last bell it sang at the moon until the whole field woke and cursed him.

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Nobody in the fair liked the noise. So Marrow, the tabby who rode on the strongman's shoulder and had lives to spare, went padding across the wet grass with a ladybird riding on her ear for luck. The ladybird was red as a fairing and no bigger than a thimble. 'Take me to the wolf,' she said, 'and I'll tell him the moon is only a lamp someone forgot to put out.'

The wolf wouldn't hear it. He threw his head back and howled until a hummingbird dropped out of the Ferris wheel's lights, green and blue as a kingfisher's dream, and hung in the air before his muzzle. 'Hush, you silly grey thing,' the bird said. 'Your mother's been gone a winter and the moon knows it.' The wolf went quiet, and Marrow curled against his side like a loose scarf.

In the morning the fair packed up and rolled off toward the coast. Jacob found the ladybird asleep on the latch of the empty cage, and the wolf asleep with his chin on the cat's back. If you go looking, you'll find them still on the side of the caravan, and nobody has heard a howl from that field since.