Black fine line tattoos of art tools, including a feather, pencil, marker, paintbrushes and a palette knife, on a forearm and wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Art tool tattoos on forearm and wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person in a paint-spattered apron shows a forearm and wrist covered in small black tattoos of art supplies. The designs include a feather, a pencil, a pencil sharpener, an eraser, a marker pen, paintbrushes, a palette knife and a loose scribble, drawn with fine, even linework. The image is in black ink only, set against a plain light background.

Fine line Forearm Feather Pencil Paintbrush

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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 tin arrived on a Tuesday, still smelling of turpentine and the cheap ginger biscuits Harold kept in his bottom drawer. Nobody had asked me to open it. I was there to clear the flat before the landlord changed the locks, and I had already filled four bin bags with mismatched mugs and brown envelopes of bills. The tin sat on the windowsill with its lid bent back, and inside, wrapped in a tea towel, were his tools.

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There was a pencil worn down to a stub, a sharpener shaped like a small tin drum, a rubber gone grey at one corner, and a marker whose cap had been lost sometime during the Thatcher years. Under those lay three brushes, the bristles still stiff with ochre, and a palette knife with a wooden handle darkened by thumbs. I kept the feather until last. It was a grey goose quill, cut at a slant, and on the tea towel someone had written in pencil: for the one who draws what I can't.

I had always assumed Harold was a painter who never sold anything. He had a sketchbook full of loops, scribbles that ran on for pages without lifting the pen, and I used to think they were the sort of thing a man did while waiting for the kettle. Turning the pages on the bare floor, I found a note tucked between two of them in his square capitals: THE LOOP IS THE DRAWING. THE REST IS ARGUMENT.

I took the pencil to the kitchen table and sharpened it until the shavings curled like pale ribbon. Then I drew a loop without thinking about it, and another through the first, and by the time the light had gone I had filled a page with nothing that resembled anything at all. I put the tin in my bag and left the sketchbook open on the table, so the landlord would find something he didn't understand.