Black brushstroke tattoo wrapping around the upper arm and elbow of a person with the arm raised, in a loose ink-wash style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black brushstroke tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black brushstroke design sweeps across the upper arm and wraps over the elbow, with a long curved stroke at the bottom and smaller dashes and a thinner wisp above. The strokes show soft grey edges and solid black cores, suggesting a single brush gesture. The background is a grey shuttered wall, and the arm is raised to show the tattoo clearly.

Upper arm Brushstroke Abstract

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

Dessie had painted shop fronts for forty years, and the brush still knew the trick of one long pull, loaded thick at the heel and lifted before the end so the stroke thinned into nothing. Nobody on the ninth floor of Halden House asked for it any more. The council wanted the bins numbered, the lifts signed, and the new wall of the car park lettered in a font that looked like a printer's error.

Keep reading

Her grandson Kemal came up on Thursdays with a carrier bag of tins from the hardware shop on Mill Road. He never said why he wanted the old lettering brushes, only that his mate's dad had a van with his name on it that had gone grey in the rain, and could she do the name again. She told him sign-writing wasn't about the name. It was about the stop at the end of the stroke, where you decided to let go.

They practised on newspaper spread across the lino, the window open to the sound of traffic and someone's radio two flats down. He kept pressing too hard. She kept tapping his wrist with the handle until he lifted, and the stroke he finally made was thin at one end and black at the other, like a bird going out of sight.

When the kettle clicked she came back to find the newsprint curled at the corners and Kemal grinning at a wet line across the paper. "Thirty years of you telling me to lift," he said. "Didn't think it'd be this easy." She pressed the cap onto the tin and didn't tell him it had taken her a whole winter to learn.