Colour tattoo of a blue police box surrounded by pale circular rotor rings and swirling pink and teal bands, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue police box and time rotor tattoo

Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a blue police box at the centre, with the words POLICE and BOX visible across its top. Pale concentric rings and circular motifs overlap the box, and loose swirls of pink, teal and blue wrap around the design. The shading is smooth and painterly, with the blue box fading into darker tones at its edges.

Other Police box Tardis Circle Swirl

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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

You have worked the Strand crossing for eleven years, long enough to know which lorry drivers lie about their cargo and which will cry at the scanner. So when a blue box appears in lane nine at twenty past three on a wet Tuesday, with no vehicle behind it and no driver in sight, you do what the manual says and radio it in. The reply comes back in a voice you don't recognise, asking you to read the markings. You tell them what the panel says: POLICE, then BOX, in white capitals gone soft with rain.

Keep reading

Nobody has ever filed a form for a box like this. Your supervisor, Mrs Okonedo, strides out in her hi-vis with a torch she doesn't need and knocks twice on the door. It opens inward onto a room far too large for the chassis, lit by a central column that hums the colour of a bruise, with rings of pale light turning slowly around it like the inside of a clockwork mind. A man in a tweed coat and an unreasonable scarf steps out, looks back at the queue of lorries stretching to the motorway, and asks whether anyone has been stamped through yet today.

You say no. He says good, because the nineteenth century has been waiting and does not like to be kept. He takes your passport, reads your date of birth aloud, and frowns as if it has personally disappointed him. "Twenty more years of this," he says. "Shame. You could have had Lisbon." Then he hands the passport back and asks which of the lorries is carrying the clocks.

The gate stays open all afternoon. When the box finally fades, the tarmac where it stood is bone dry and the rain has stopped as if someone turned a tap. In the morning the log shows one entry for lane nine at 15:20: a vehicle with no plate, no nationality and a single word in the purpose field, which you have not yet had the nerve to read aloud.