Colour tattoo of a snarling creature with a glowing teal eye, blue and purple shading and ink splatter drips, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and purple creature on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A snarling creature head with a single teal eye, sharp teeth and spiky horn-like shapes is drawn in heavy black linework. Teal, violet and purple shading fills the form, with black ink splatters, thin trailing strokes and paint-like drips around it. The design sits centrally on the upper back, with the ink spreading out across the shoulder blade.

Neo-trad Back Creature Monster Eye Teeth Splatter Drip Horn

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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

Sunday, and the teal ran out at Sallow Creek, so I mixed the last of it with violet and a dash of the black I keep for lettering. The sign at the Hollins Motel needed VACANCY in red, but the board came out wrong. I knocked the tin over on the tailgate and the spill soaked into the plywood like it had somewhere better to be. I left it to dry on the bonnet while I ate my tinned peaches.

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By dusk the splatter had grown a jaw. Two horn shapes had lifted off the board where the varnish cracked, and a single teal eye had opened where the paint pooled thickest. I told myself it was the heat and the cheap gin Mrs Hollins poured me. Then the thing showed its teeth when I laughed, and I stopped laughing.

Mrs Hollins didn't scream. She stood in the car park with her arms folded for a long while, then said the last sign painter who worked here left in a hurry with a girl from Tucson and never came back for his brushes. She said the creature had been in the wall since. She offered me a room for the price of a fresh coat.

This morning the board is dry. The creature is still there, curled round the word VACANCY, and every man who stops for petrol stares at it before he asks for a key. Three of them have booked. I have started a second board for the road to the coast, and I have left the eye unpainted for now, the way you leave a door ajar for a dog that might come back.