Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a blue and purple whale with splash strokes on the upper arm of a woman in a grey vest top.

Blue and purple whale on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stylised whale or similar marine creature swims along the upper arm, with its head turned upward and its body built from loose blue, violet and teal brushstrokes. Soft splashes and streaks trail behind it, giving a painted, watercolour feel with unfinished edges. The tattoo is rendered almost entirely in vivid colour against the bare skin, with the artwork filling the outer arm from shoulder to elbow.

Upper arm Whale Sea creature Splash Brushstroke Watercolour

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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 sign above the chandler's door had been Mrs Pryce's late husband's idea, a whale painted in whatever was left in the lifeboat tins, and by March the rain had faded it to a grey rumour of a whale. Gwen went up the ladder with a putty knife and a bucket of cold tea to scrape the boards clean, and found that something under the grey was still wet. The tide was turning under the slipway, and the gulls were quarrelling over the bait box.

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She mixed ultramarine with a squeeze of teal from the bottom of the tin. The brush went on heavier than she meant, and the colour ran in long streaks down the board as if the whale had been moving when she caught it. She gave it a head turned up toward the gulls, a flick of violet along its back, and a few pale strokes behind it for the spray. When she climbed down, the streaks seemed to have shifted a finger's width toward the harbour mouth.

That night the board hung empty. The harbourmaster's boy swore he saw a blue flank breaking the water beyond the mole, trailing a pale wake like a dropped scarf. Gwen said nothing to him. Her husband had gone out past that same mole in colours nobody could name, and the boat had never come back to be painted over.

In the morning there was a fresh smear of blue on the chandler's wall, dried in the shape of a fin, and nobody had painted it. Every high tide since, it has looked a little wetter at the edges.