Black and grey sleeve tattoo of clouds and ornamental shading on a man's forearm and upper arm, with a small tattoo visible on his ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey cloud sleeve on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A man in a white t-shirt and grey ripped jeans holds a white cap while showing a full sleeve tattoo on his right arm. The sleeve uses dense black and grey shading to form cloud-like and ornamental shapes, with a wristwatch worn above the hand. A small tattoo is visible on his left ankle, and the photo is taken from behind and above on an outdoor pavement.

Forearm Upper arm Ankle Cloud Sleeve Ornament

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

The Royal Almanac of Vessary listed forty-one kinds of cloud, and each one had to be painted by hand before the spring tithe. I was twelve the winter my uncle's hand began to shake, so he sent me up the Cauldron Stair with a jar of lampblack, a brush made from a badger's tail, and orders not to come down until I had found the grey that clouds wear when they are about to break.

Keep reading

The stair was older than the kingdom's maps. Every landing had a niche where a painter before us had left a pot of pigment gone hard as slate, and I passed eleven of them before the wind turned cold enough to make my fingers stupid. At the top, the sky over the mountains was doing what it always did, stacking itself into towers and then pulling them down again, too quickly for any brush. I tried anyway. My first attempts looked like bruises, my second like wet wool, and the third, which I was rather proud of, looked like nothing at all, because by the time I had finished the cloud had gone east to bother somebody else.

On the fourth morning a herdsman's boy climbed up with bread and a message that the Duchess had sent her own painters to the coast. He stood beside me, looked at my pages, and laughed, not unkindly. "You're drawing them the way the almanac says," he said. "Look at what's actually there." So I looked. The grey was not one colour. It was lead at the edges and smoke in the belly and a faint violet where the light gave up, and all of it was moving.

I went down the Stair at dusk with a single page, not the forty-one I had promised. My uncle held it up to the lamp for a long time. Then he pinned it to the wall of the almanac room, above the old drawings, and said nothing. Next morning the real cloud over the palace was the same shade as my ink, and nobody could tell which one had come first.